"300: Rise of an Empire"

“300” burst onto the pop culture scene eight years ago on a gush of computer-generated blood, earning itself a place in the artistic pantheon as the single most successful piece of exploitation cinema of the last decade. The spectacular visuals, absurd violence, and physically impossible action combined with gross historical inaccuracy, an ethos of machismo, and jingoistic undercurrents about democracy and Middle Eastern threats created the ideal film for the American teenage male, whose unfathomable appetites for stimulation are best satisfied by a steady stream of alternating images of blood and pornography, preferably justified by appeals to freedom. While much has changed in the intervening eight years, these appetites at least have remained a cultural constant. As a result, it is no surprise that the sequel, “300: Rise of an Empire,” directed by Noam Murro, provides a spectacle equal to its worthy predecessor.

The central action of the new film is the Battle of Salamis, the 480 BCE naval engagement at which a Greek confederacy led by the Athenian Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) defeated the Persian Empire, deciding the outcome of the Persian Wars. As is to be expected, the established historical facts are blithely ignored in favor of unreal visuals. In an extended flashback to the Battle of Marathon, Themistocles is shown as the killer of Xerxes’ father Darius I (Igal Naor); Artemisia (Eva Green), a historical female commander in the Persian fleet, is given a vastly expanded role as the admiral of the whole navy and a wholly fictionalized background. Needless to say, because this is a “300” movie, Themistocles and Artemisia have an intense sexual encounter during a negotiation meeting. The fact that the Athenian general actually won through cunning rather than manly prowess—he pretended to defect to Xerxes—is not acknowledged. In brief, this film is a high school history teacher’s nightmare.

Nevertheless, accuracy is not the goal of this movie. Heroic action and astonishing visual effects are the ends, and these ends are met with rare efficacy. Murro’s camerawork is significantly less cartoonish than that of his predecessor Zack Snyder; while one or two sequences, especially those giving the origin story of Xerxes in Persia, possess the laughably surreal, luminous quality of the original “300,” there is a remarkable restraint that underlies the cinematography. Murro’s use of 3D filming actually bests most of the medium’s other examples, especially the visual disaster that was the 3D version of Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby.” He seems to understand that the paradigm used in constructing the image for a 3D film is not photography but sculptural relief, and that, as a result, clean framing is key to the movie.

The primary weakness of the film is a temporal dissipation of action that reduces its power. While the first “300” maintained a moderately strict linear structure that ensured that the dramatic intensity of the film was focused on the Battle of Thermopylae and its disastrous climax, “300: Rise of an Empire” diminishes the tightness of the narrative with long flashbacks and the extension of the main action over three days and two settings.

Overall, “300: Rise of an Empire” is the successor that one would expect for “300.” It will be interesting to see if and how the franchise continues, with the Persians crushed at the end of this film. The myth of ancient Greek unity that underlies the script of both films comes on hard times at the next major item in Greek military history, the Peloponnesian War. Regardless of the failings of the plot, a few things are certain: blood, sex, and amazing cinematography.

—Staff writer Jude D. Russo can be reached at jude.russo@thecrimson.com.