At no point in the development of 300: Rise Of An Empire did I think “Yeah, that is a great idea.” As a matter of fact, the whole thing felt creatively bankrupt, and symptomatic of the this current rabid need for brand recognition amongst those with the power to green light projects. 300 was a visually stunning graphic novel from one of comic-dom’s all-time greats, Frank Miller. It was filled with Miller’s typically sexualized brand of graphic violence and men doing man things in a hard-boiled fashion. Then Zack Snyder made that into a mega-hit movie of the same title, which has been endlessly ripped off ever since to no avail, in that none of the copy cats came close to either the box office or the enjoyment level of that first film. Not to mention that, as actual history and years of cultural awareness have made clear… all of our heroes from 300 are named as such because they all sacrificed their lives for Sparta.
So a sequel, then, coming along 8 years after the first, was something that sounded like a terrible idea. The visuals of the first had been oft-repeated. The characters of the first were mostly killed. And the most interesting battle story that the franchise could possibly have had to tell was told. 300: Rise Of An Empire had pretty much nothing going for it. Billed as an origin story for the villainous god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), this felt like the worst kind of desperate cash grab. Even 300-creator Zack Snyder was stepping back and handing the directing reins to Noam Murro, whose only previous feature film directing credit is the 2008 film Smart People.
But then the magic of casting happened.
And I’ve got to tell you that 300: Rise Of An Empire is one of the biggest surprises of 2014. It isn’t a great film by any stretch, and is plagued by the messy morality and chest thumping that the first film glamorized so much. But this is a film that works on so many levels. And I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention to any of those other levels if it hadn’t been for one Eva Green. This review is coming late and much has already been said of Green’s wickedly watchable performance as the Greek-by-birth Artemisia, who has vowed vengeance against her people and commands the entire Persian naval fleet (and proves Xerxes to be little more than a figurehead himself). I’ll just have to settle for joining the chorus and suggesting that one might even want to see this film if only not to miss this wonderful, salacious role being wholly owned by Eva Green. And I want to be clear that while the sceenplay by Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad (and based on Frank Miller’s own Xerxes graphic novel) is much better than I had expected it to be, I’m not sure even the Artemisia on the page held anything special. What possessed Eva Green to embody this performance to such a degree that she single-handedly transforms the film into a star vehicle for herself? We can’t know what Green’s motivations were, we can only revel in the fun and the fury of her Artemisia, and acknowledge the fact that her involvement in this project gave the film a spark of life that it desperately needed, and gave the franchise its most engaging character… even far surpassing the career-making role of King Leonidis made famous by Gerard Butler in all his beefiness.
But even Eva Green couldn’t have entirely righted a ship that was totally on the wrong course to begin with. And the Snyder/Johnstad screenplay also performed a bit of a miracle in actually making me care about the story. And that was an uphill battle for them. As the first several minutes of the film played out, I was not engaged. New characters, new Greek city-states, tons of poetic narration… it was clear to me that the filmmakers were going for an expanded story, but I wasn’t clear that I cared. And yet somehow, the interesting structure of the tale, told as a “side-quel”, or simply taking place right alongside and near and around the events of 300, really worked for the story. Instead of feeling like a studio cash grab, I felt the weight of the importance of what the 300 Spartans had done and how it impacted the whole of Greece. The 300 were martyrs, yes, and ROAE shows us how their act actually did ripple through history and aid the cause of this film’s hero and protagonist Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton in a totally adequate performance that never threatens to rival Butler’s or Green’s in the charisma department, but serves well enough to anchor the thing) in uniting Greece against the Persians. You know, for freedom.
So the structure of it all is non-traditional, builds a strong arc that had me increasingly more invested and excited as the proceedings marched ahead, and was filled with clever battles featuring different tactics and billions of pixels of computerized bloodshed. Artemisia is manipulating Xerxes and commanding a giant navy all at once, and this giant naval element helped to add just enough spice to the visual palette this time out that there could be a surprise or two.
And about that computerized bloodshed. I saw the film in glorious 2-D, and I was shocked at how terrible the blood looked. And there is a lot of it. A lot, a lot. Certainly more violent than the first film by a mile, limbs are hacked, heads are severed, eyes are gouged and even eaten. The humans of the 300 franchise, whether woman or man, are essentially meat. Beautifully chiseled eye candy one moment, procreating hulks of biology and breeding the next, and butcher block fodder after that. And in this visceral, albeit stylized, world of flesh worship, the poorly rendered and clearly digital blood fountains are a pretty big problem. Even the worst practical blood and gore effects of yesteryear have a tangibility to them which gorehounds can’t dismiss. I miss the orange-tinged blood of old-school action and horror when geysers of pixelated blood assault my eyes in such dramatic and poorly rendered fashion as they do here in 300: ROAE.
I’m left to wonder if the blood was somehow specifically rendered for a 3-D viewing experience due to how awful it looked, which is sort of shocking since the rest of the film looked pretty spectacular. The tightly-controlled visuals of the original 300 have been so frequently ripped off since that first film that I’ve genuinely tired of them. The de-saturated, almost black and white color palette, the seemingly endless dark and cloudy skies (when in reality Greece is clearly a Mediterranean climate), the speed-ramping slow motion, and the relentlessly CG-assisted battle-scapes. 300: ROAE brings all of those back, and (surprise, surprise) reminds us that when a whole lot of money is thrown at this type of stylized world, it can still thrill and excite you. I was thrilled by a number of sequences from a visual and action-direction point of view. Everything leading up to and including the final confrontation between Themistocles and Artemisia was wonderful and included a very long and complicated sword battle captured in what appeared to be a single take. And there is a glorious moment when a soldier, consumed by flames, falls off the side of a ship which is pouring oil into the water. As the flaming soldier connects with the spewing oil, an inferno is ignited and the chaos pauses for a moment for this beautiful and awful visual to sink in. There are dozens of little moments of gore, action, costumes, and battle tactics to entertain and engage viewers and pull them back into this world that most all of us had moved on from.
I’m not sure I need to see a 300 trilogy after this expanded tale. You don’t want to tempt fate, and there’s only so many Eva Greens out there who can totally redeem what seemed like a stale idea. But I have to give credit where credit is due and suggest that 300: Rise Of An Empire is indeed a worthy follow up to the original, and even retroactively improves on the original by giving a great context to it all. And seeing as how 300: ROAE has grossed close to $300 million dollars worldwide as of this writing, I think it is safe to say there will probably be a third film to complete a trilogy and get that Empire risen. I guess I’ll be there to see it through to the end, now that a little life seems to have been injected into the franchise’s veins. But it’ll take a series of miracles similar to what happened here to top the bar that Eva Green (and Snyder and Murro) have set.
And I’m Out.