If you really liked the movie 300 but you thought it was too arty and didn't have enough of the following:
Beheadings
Boats
Boobs
Choke-sex
Plastic-looking digital blood
Voice overs
...then you're in luck! 300: Rise of an Empire is the movie for you. Empire isnât so much a sequel to 300 as a side-quel, in which the (much more interesting) events of 300 happen simultaneously with this film. To remind you of that fact, characters continually make reference to King Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans, and we occasionally see flashbacks from the first film. As in 300, the enemies of Empire are Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and the invading Persian army. But rather than Leonidas, the hero is Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton, not nearly as intense as Gerard Butler, but charismatic enough in his own way), admiral of the Athenian navy. Instead of the Spartansâ signature red capes, the Athenians wear blue capes. Instead of 300 Spartans fighting off thousands of Persians, itâs a handful of Athenian boats fending off thousands of Persian warships. (I guess 300: Blue Crush didnât have the kind of menacing ring that producers were going for.)
In case you canât tell, this is a bad movie. But itâs also kind of insane, in an almost admirable way. First of all, you have Eva Green as the lead heavy, Artemesia, the leader of the Persian navy. With her crazy eyes peering out from behind approximately five pounds of eyeliner, Green gnaws on terrible lines like âTODAY, WE DELIVER SUBMISSION!â She wears ridiculous gowns with spiky gold spines sticking out the back. Itâs not a career-making performance, but it sure is a fun one, at least.
Greenâs slobbering villainous bravado is matched only by the viewerâs increasing suspicion as the film plays out that nobody behind the camera had any fucking clue what they were doing. 300 director Zack Snyder is too busy transforming Superman into a gloomy, wretched mess to bother directing the sequel, but his fingerprints are everywhere on the credits: Heâs the producer, the co-screenwriter, and Noam Murroâs direction is aped directly from Snyder with its relentless love of slow motion and hyper-stylized computer graphics. A lot of Empire could be a dumb video game, with its repetitious violence and those arterial sprays of gooey black blood shooting out of every wound.
The story is garbage, the copious voice overs are impenetrable, and the script is a string of clunky lines about freedom and how today is the time to âSEIZE YOUR GLORY!â Nobody involved in the making of the film seems to know what the point of the movie is, and sometimes it all gets so vacant that it becomes an exercise in the filmography of nothingness. If a parking garage came to life and made a movie, that movie might look a lot like Empire. If I was high and looking to kill time at the multiplex, I guess Iâm saying, this is the movie to see. You might not remember anything when itâs all over, but youâll sure be certain that you watched something.