300: rise of an empire
Brutality and bare torsos define the sequel to 2006’s 300
There’s a scene in the computerized, beefcake history lesson 300: Rise of an Empire, where the evil Persian warrior Artemisia uses her sword to lop off the head of a prisoner, sending torrents of CGI blood — a thick, viscous substance that’s a torrent of maroon in the film’s saturated palette — streaming across the screen in stylistic slow motion.
Artemisia then lifts up the head, kisses it on the lips, and flings it right at us, a piece of horrific flotsam that floats in three dimensions across the violent landscape of ocean waves, abused galley slaves, fierce warriors and armies of bare-chested guys who seem to have arrived fresh from three hours of free weights. The movie, like its 2006 predecessor 300, looks like a combination of a firefighters’ calendar and Halloween on Muscle Beach: just picture what would happen if the Mr. Universe contest got fractious.
That is to say, if you liked the battle of Thermopylae, you’ll love this.
A lot of it has to do with Artemisia, as played by Eva Green, the Bernardo Bertolucci star ( The Dreamers) and Bond girl ( Casino Royale) who has graduated into a stylized vamp who purrs with sadistic hauteur — “I know every single man beneath my lash” — sashays among her soldiers with aggressive sexuality and pretty well steals the movie from the hordes of interchangeable sixpacks who quake at her feet.
It’s a performance that captures the origins of Rise of an Empire, which is based on the Frank Miller graphic novel Xerxes. Set at the same time as 300, it tells how Artemisia, who controlled the Persian fleet of boats — a vast armada thrown across a raging sea, or at least a raging program of pixels — sent to conquer Greece. She’s the right woman for the job, seeing as how she was earlier captured by Greeks and used as a sex slave for several years, an ordeal that in no way affected her flawless complexion.
Defending the homeland, meanwhile, is Themistokles ( Animal Kingdom’s Sullivan Stapleton), a general who killed Persian king Darius at the battle of Marathon and then stupidly neglected to also kill the king’s son, Xerxes. The son has now grown up to be Rodrigo Santoro, familiar from the first film as preening demigod dressed in gold chains, a gold skirt and gold skin and posing with an hauteur we haven’t seen since Yul Brynner was strutting around the set of The 10 Commandments. For the record, Xerxes puts a lot more hip into his strut: He looks like he took dance lessons from John Wayne.
In any event, he threatens Athens, and the other citystates — particularly Sparta, run by Lena Headey — don’t want to get involved. That forces Themistokles to take his small band of men and boats against overwhelming odds, trying to protect what the screenplay calls “an Athenian idea called democracy.” The screenplay (by Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad) is filled such elevated language (“her eyes blazed like scarlet coals”) and it gives the movie the tone of a romance novel as written by Shakespeare.
In the middle of all this, there’s a love story of sorts between Themistokles and Arte- misia, but like most things in the movie, it’s a brutal thing, filled with grimaces, dares and a lot of slapping about. Most of what happens in Rise of an Empire — be it cruel, noble, or erotic — happens with much flexing of muscles and swinging of heavy armament. Limbs are lopped off. Heads are split. Eva Green removes her top.
Snyder, who directed 300 and set the standard of graphicnovel transcriptions, has handed the job over to Israeli filmmaker Noam Murro, but you can’t tell the difference. It’s all there: super slow-mo, backgrounds burnished into flat surrealism, stark lighting. It’s a new kind of movie storytelling that’s both thrilling and exhausting. As they used to say in old Persia, beware of Greeks baring chests. ΣΣ½