The good news is 300: Rise of an Empire doesn’t feel like a direct-to-DVD sequel. The bad news is that it feels more like a 300 TV series spinoff. It’s more Spartacus: Blood and Sand than it is 300. An over-the-top bloodbath of little consequence. It’s a movie with only three real characters, while everyone else is thrown to the meat grinder. It’s just as preposterous as the first, but it lacks any kind of the “Us Against the World” spirit of the first. Sure, there are insurmountable odds here, too. But they’re met with such indifference from the film that it soon becomes clear that the only purpose is to fast forward through the “story” so we can get to the next CGI-enhanced action sequence.
300: Rise of an Empire takes place before, during and after the first movie. Greek general and by-the-bootstraps Grecian hero Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) leads a navy against the invading Persians. The Persian navy is led by the bloodthirsty Artemisia (Eva Green). Green is the perfect actress to play such an overblown, demented villainess. Like a female Nic Cage, Green throws herself into whatever whackadoo character she’s called upon to portray. She embraces the absurd, which is immensely endearing. It’s too bad that she’s surrounded by so much literal and figurative wood. Like the poor but chiseled saps surrounding Themistokles, Artemisia’s crew is simply there for the bloodletting. As for Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), he’s been relegated to a six-pack sporting second fiddle. A snarling, all-powerful god-king who can’t find a way to control a female navy commander. It soon becomes clear that Artemisia is the real brains of the operation, and rightfully so.
And that’s it for the movie’s actual characters. There’s a Greek father-son duo that is shoehorned in for sentimentality’s sake, but it never amounts to much. Like you might have expected, 300: Rise of an Empire is more concerned with how many severed-limb, slow-motion shots they can pack into 103 minutes. Speed up all that slow-mo to normal-mo and we’d be talking about the biggest budget short film in history.
Every battle scene feels like a cut-scene in a video game. Without anyone on the battlefield to remotely care about, all that’s left is blood, guts and no heart. Now that’s not to say that the original 300 was a pinnacle of character building, but it’s leaps and bounds better than whatever this is.
Like the first, every shot is stylized to the nth degree, so much so that each scene features CGI-enhanced dust particles floating around the periphery. It gets so ridiculously apparent that they’ve created this free-floating dust that my allergies started acting up. Most of the time it appears that the people of Greece are living in some type of zero-gravity snow globe. It’s such a bizarre cinematic choice. Look at all this floating dust and ash, cool huh?
Everyone speaks in gruff whispers. It’s a melodramatic mess of grunts and hero speeches. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dull.
If there’s one interesting aspect of 300: Rise of an Empire it’s Eva Green’s relentless desire to not only chew up scenery, but to spew it all over the audience after she’s done tasting it. She’s such a gloriously wacky wicked villain that any time she’s not on screen it feels like you’re watching a completely different movie — counting the seconds until she’s back acting like the wonderful nutcase she is. Nothing else matters but Eva Green’s apparent insanity. Nothing. Ashes to dust, and all that.
