That, anyway, is the take that Miller and Snyder, as producer and cowriter (with Kurt Johnstad) lay on their new movie - and that the always luscious Eva Green brings to ferociously seductive life.įor a legendary woman warrior, Artemisia shows few strategic skills, counting on her edge in naval vessels to defeat the Greeks. But maybe your teacher didn’t mention that Artemisia, a Greek girl who became Queen of Persia, commanded the imperial Navy with supreme finesse in swordsmanship and the sneer of a gorgeous Gorgon to wither all enemies. You knew all that from ninth-grade history. Led by General Themistocles (Aussie actor Sullivan Stapleton, who looks and sounds like Michael Fassbender’s grunt double), they will out-fight and outsmart the gigantic naval force of King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and put an end to Persia’s dream of annexing Greece. This time the Athenians - trained in pottery and poetry, not war - raise the pan-Hellenic flag.
Rather, it’s a “meanwhile” movie: it covers events that took place in the rest of Greece slightly before, during and after the Sparta-Persia skirmish. Rise of an Empire, which opens exactly seven years after 300, is neither a sequel nor a prequel to Zack Snyder’s CGI/green-screen epic about Leonides (Gerard Butler) at the Battle of Thermopylae in 479 B.C. One can watch in repulsion or wonder either response is O.K. In dark, roiling images captured by cinematographer Simon Duggan, who last did The Great Gatsby (this is his Great Gutsby), the spectacle in Rise of an Empire provides both a graphic lesson on the spoils, indeed the soils, of war and a dizzying aesthetic experience - as when an injured warrior falls from his ship, and the plasma spreads through the water like a school of sea anemones. (READ: Lev Grossman’ inside story on Zack Snyder’s 300) Soldiers hack away at their foes, and the gore spills in slo-mo across the 3-D IMAX screen like an action painting from Jackson Pollock’s crimson period, or a troll’s projectile vomit, or fistfuls of cranberry sauce hurled across the Thanksgiving table by your angry uncle.
In depicting the Battle of Salamis between the Greeks and the Persians, director Noam Murro has upped the density level of the blood spilled: from, say, Campbell’s Tomato Soup to Campbell’s Chunky Beef with Tomato and Extra Innards. There’s plenty of blood in 300: Rise of an Empire, the followup to the 2007 smash 300 - both based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller.