Review - 300: Rise Of An Empire - This. Is. SPOILEROPOLIS!!!!

Athenians out for a walk. Hey, Greece was a tough neighborhood.

I went into 300: Rise of an Empire assuming it couldn't equal the first film. In this, I was correct. 300 helped create an entirely new visual sense, in which action scenes are envisioned as paintings slow motion paintings. The slightly sepia-toned look of the film has become de rigueur for sword and sandal films and television shows. Alternating between slow motion and high-speed in action sequences has been copied in a number of films and TV programs (e.g., Watchmen, Immortals, the Spartacus TV series).

300: Rise of an Empire these elements, except for the color palette is much darker. Where the original bathed most of its scenes in a warm tan glow, this film is made up of layers of blacks and grays. Even the blood is dark, like thick red paint. But, the reliance (at times, over reliance) on slow-motion, the narration via speech making, the extremely graphic violence, these things are all still in evidence.

Eva Green, showing how to put the "sexy" in "homicidal."

I could go over the plot in detail, but it really isn't important. Athenian general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) is trying to hold off the Persian navy, led by sexy and deadly Artemisia (Eva Green). We get background on some of the characters, all in service of the main theme of the film, that people's actions often come back to haunt them, even if they seemed like the right idea at the time. Themistocles is a hero to the Greek for killing Persian king Darius (Igor Naor) ten years before the events of the film, but this act set his son Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro reprising his role from the first film) on the path leading to a war of vengeance against Greece. Xerxes relied on Artemisia to secure the throne, but this means she has no respect for him, seeing herself as the real power in Persia. Artemisia, a Greek, let's her past - her family was slaughtered by Greek soldiers and she was cast into slavery - lead her to an obsession with destroying Greece. And Greece pays for the treatment of Artemisia with war, blood and death.

Sullivan Stapleton tries to channel Gerard Butler.

Of course, the main reason people see this films not for themes or character development. They're going to see a ton of violence. And the movie delivers. The action scenes are well done. They are very graphic, with heads and limbs being lopped off (although they miss out on the opportunity to have someone strangled with their own intestines; that's always good for a laugh) and blood splattering the camera lens. This last effect gets annoying quickly. The first time is neat; the 23rd time, I just wanted to say "clean off the lens, damn it."

The film benefits from some good performances. Eva Green is a compelling villain with mostly understandable motives. Stepleton delivers his lines with enough gusto to be believably rousing and swings a sword ably enough. The rest of the cast consists of glorified cameos. Lena Headey, the Spartan Queen Gorgo, is a welcome sight, although there are long stretches of the film where she is absent. She also has an out-of-place fight scene at the end of the film, leading the Spartan fleet, something that was established in the first film. Worse than that, it doesn't pay off the way it should, with a fight between Gorgo and Artemisia. In Jello...

Xerxes asks crowd the cape is too much.

This is an easy film to pick apart. Many of the characters communicate by speeches; this becomes melodramatic to the point of self-parody as the film progresses. The use of slow motion is excessive, at times applied to scenes (like people riding horses) where it does nothing to enhance the action or drama. The opening narration goes on for what seems like 20 minutes. Unlike the original film, where the narrative conceit - that the entire film is an inspirational story told on the eve of battle sets up the more fantastical elements as embellishments by the narrator, that is not the case in this film. Queen Gorgo provides the opening narration, much of which repeats what we are seeing on the screen, but the bulk of the film itself is not told from her point-of-view as storyteller. This means there is no built-in "suspension of disbelief" for the elements of the movie that are fantastic or don't make sense. Finally, the action ALMOST gets to the point where it is boring. The creative team does a couple of things to try and shake things up. For example, they try to "spice up" one naval battle by having the Persians use a bronze age oil tanker to burn out the Greek fleet. While this - and other scenes - look neat, the central problem is that the action becomes repetitive, with generic CGI ships ramming into each other and characters, who look pretty much the same, hacking off virtual limbs. While it is pretty - in a dark, violent way - when the film ends you realize you’ve just watched the cinematic equivalent of a marshmallow. It looks plumb and appealing and it’s kind of tasty but it’s mostly just air.

Is it worth seeing? Yes; if you liked 300, you’ll like this film. However, unlike the first movie, which had innovative imagery to prop up its bare-bones story, 300: Rise of an Empire offers nothing new.