300: Rise of an Empire

Considering the success of the original 300, it was probably inevitable that they would try to cash in with some kind of sequel. The tricky thing about that is that almost all the characters from the original movie were dead, so a sequel would have to build up a new cast to work with. It took them seven years to get around to adapting the Battle of Salamis into a kind of sidequel, and while most of the characters are new, it follows the story of the Persian wars in the same continuity.

The great strength of 300 was how, narratively and emotionally, everything condensed down to a single battle with clearly-drawn lines and direct, easily comprehensible action. Even in a movie as wildly inaccurate as 300 became, it is easy to lay it out for someone unfamiliar with the history: Greeks go here, Persians there, fight. The subsequent military actions of the war, from the naval battles at Artemisium and Salamis to the big throwdown at Plataea, were far more complex, muddled, and sometimes indecisive. Laying all that out for a casual audience was going to be hard no matter how you did it.

Pretty much the only reason Rise of an Empire works is because they didn’t try, and just dove headfirst into the fantastical, hyper-exaggerated stylization of the first movie and went even harder with it. They try to build a mystique around the Athenian leader Themistocles, but despite a lot of myth-making (He did not, in fact, kill the Persian Emperor Darius at Marathon) they just can’t manage to make him very interesting. Portrayed by Aussie actor Sullivan Stapleton, Themistocles is reduced to a bearded stack of muscles who spouts painfully hackey pablum about freedom and glory against a backdrop of spraying CG blood.

The script is definitely a weak point in this movie, as while 300 was not exactly Shakespeare, it managed to carry the day with archetypical moments that went on to become iconic, all delivered by actors who were giving it everything they had. Here they try for the same kind of distilled approach, but they just can’t carry it off. The characters are flat and unremarkable, and none of the lines are quotable or even memorable. The lone exception among the mid-tier acting going on here is Eva Green, who just runs with the role of Artemisia, set up as the real villain of the piece. She acts like she knows exactly what kind of movie this is, and she stalks and prowls and kills her way through her scenes like she is having a grand time.

What saves this is the dedication to action that is completely unreal and yet also completely awesome. Once more the Greeks go into battle with nothing more than leather panties as armor, and have a habit of taking their helmets off just to indicate that they are really pissed off. Once more the Persians are a bunch of swarthy guys with beards and guyliner – the Immortals here are pretty much just Uruk-Hai at this point – and their conspicuous armor does them no good at all. Every battle is a blur of flailing swords, shields and spears painted with immense swaths of slow-motion digital gore.

It shouldn’t work, and in fact the battles are not as gripping as what we got in 300, both because we don’t really care about the characters and because the battles here are just too long and too similar. And yet, with the painterly backgrounds and artificial colors, the whole thing comes together and makes for a visually stunning panoply of violence. No dedicated Sword & Sorcery movie ever had this level of gleeful carnage, but this shows what a well-done Conan or Elric movie could look like. Especially cool are the naval sequences, as I don’t think anyone has ever depicted ancient naval warfare so lavishly, and it looks amazing partly because we have not seen it a hundred times before.

If you took out the historical context – and that would not be very hard – this would be a lavish fantasy film with buckets of violence, lots of muscular guys without shirts, and an arch-villain who swore himself to dark powers and became an eight-foot-tall god-emperor. None of that would be out of place in a Howard story, and in fact he wrote this kind of semi-historical pastiche more than once, though he was usually more careful to stick to the facts. Even the inclusion of Eva Green’s character as a sort of femme fatale Darth Vader fits right in thematically, as well as providing an excuse to get some tits onscreen and provide a nonsensical but vigorous sex scene.

This is the kind of thing I wish would become more standard for fantasy films. Gritty violence, over-the-top action, gratuitous carnality, and overtones of ancient and forbidden sorcery. There’s no reason why a Conan or a Hawkmoon movie could not look this good, or an original film if someone would actually try to write a decent script. Part of the problem is that too many writers think S&S is easy to do, when it is actually a genre that thrives on tight plotting and rich language that evokes atmosphere. We deserve so much more than what we are getting.