Back in 2005, Robert Rodriguez gave us the affected world of Sin City, Frank Miller‘s graphic novel brought to cinematic life, and very much in the style of its source material. Two years later Zack Snyder did something similar to even greater acclaim, delivering Miller’s ultra-violent, ultra-sytlized, super-slo-mo 300, creating something of a visual stamp for the director he would then mimic in his next graphic novel effort, Watchmen.
Seven years removed from 300‘s release, these films — 300 more than Sin City — look more like feature length trailers than feature length films, but even 300 had more of a narrative than 300: Rise of an Empire, though Rise of an Empire certainly talks a big game.
Replacing 300‘s narration by David Wenham‘s character with that of Lena Heady as Queen Gorgo, who lives on after the death of her husband (Gerard Butler) and his men who died fighting the Persians in the first movie, Rise of an Empire talks and talks and talks at us. What we have is an instance where a film isn’t confident the audience will understand what’s going on, not wanting to assume everyone has seen the first film and not entirely sure of how to remind us of what took place.
In fact, it almost confuses the details too much, using narration to explain character motivations, resulting in paper-thin characters built on words rather than actions. Not so surprisingly, the details are hardly complicated.
300: Rise of an Empire runs parallel to 300, beginning with how the “god king” Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) came to be, follwing his father’s death at the hands of Greek warrior Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) and how a Greek slave-turned-Persian warrior, Artemesia (Eva Green) is using Xerxes in her plot for revenge against her home country.
Meanwhile, Themistokles attempts to form a united Greece in the face of the invading Persian horde, though he’s failing to find support, especially in Sparta where they choose to send 300 of their warriors to defend their land rather than join Themistokles and the rest of Greece.
While the battles in 300 were fought on land, 300: Rise of an Empire takes to the sea. The sky is black, the waves are crushing and the digital blood sprays in abundance. Presented in 3-D with a dedication to slow-motion, director Noam Murro doesn’t depend on poking the audience with swords and spears, but boy does he love epic, over-the-shoulder shots from atop cliffs and he is obsessed with digital dust effects. Seriously, every scene in this film is filled with floating little pieces of dust to the point it’s incredibly distracting.
Back again to write the screenplay are Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad and it would seem they were so impressed with their first film they decided to make sure all the same scenes were here as well, only they’ve now been wedged into a patchwork narrative rather than as a result of the story first.
“Do we have a massive slow-motion one take battle sequence?” Yup. “Do we have a sex scene more violent than the first film?” Yup and Eva Green is topless and choked! “Do we have opportunities for blood?” More than you can imagine. “How about a beheading that sends the head flying?” We have a variation of it, this one more gruesome to be sure. “And that guy in the gold jewelry?” Oh, he’s back, and this time we see how he became that guy. It’s magical! “Voiceover?” Uh, how else you going to tell the story?
In all seriousness, you aren’t looking for the best filmmaking or even storytelling when it comes to a movie like this. You’re looking for some head-crushing action and this delivers in many ways, it just gets so bogged down in its own attempt at telling a story that it feels at odds with itself — tell the story, violence, tell the story, big battle, tell the story, sex scene, tell the story, more violence, etc. It’s tedious and it shouldn’t feel that way and by setting it at sea the battle options prove limited, which it attempts to overcome in the final act, but by that point you’re already growing tired of the monotony.
For a film of this sort, 300: Rise of an Empire is just what you’d expect it to be, an attempt to repeat the pop culture success of the first film by slightly altering what was done then. Unfortunately, it means you’re attempting to mimic a pop culture phenomenon now seven years old and do so without much in the way of a new story, or much of a story at all for that matter. General audiences have grown to be more excited about movie trailers than actual movies, but when your movie plays like a movie trailer they’ve already seen it’s not likely going to inspire much excitement.
