“Better we show them, we chose to die on our feet, rather than live on our knees!”
I like 300. I’ve seen it many times and afterwards I often want to get in a fight (and win, naturally). I’ve even taught 300 as an example of good screenwriting, as a depiction of masculine anxiety, and as a showcase of brilliant screen craft. The invented world of ancient Greece is really stunning beneath ashen skies replete with rocky outcroppings and weird supporting characters. The final result of such entertainment is less awe, though, than bludgeoned accommodation to blood and violence, all the more because that blood and violence is plainly unreal.
Throughout 300 most Greeks are good while all Persians are bad. The former wear red capes while the latter dress in black unitards so fights are easy to follow. In the lag between battles there’s also a lot of noble-sounding bullshit about the self-determination of nations. Yet 300 punctuates these silly monologues with graphic war, and every narrative climax with explanatory voice-over to help even the dimmest bulb understand that Spartans kick ass.
No viewer accepts 300 as a précis on statecraft, war craft, or the roots of Western Civilization. But there are a good number of people that nonetheless accept this swords and sandals epic as a kind of reality-based presentation because there was a real-world battle called Thermopylae (480 B.C.E.), which is the backdrop for Frank Miller’s provocative graphic novel 300, published in 1998, that was successfully leveraged onto the big screen until the phrase, “This is Sparta!” entered the popular vernacular.
You dig 300 or you don’t. Regardless, it works well inside narrow rules and this efficiency makes it worth repeated viewing.
300: Rise of an Empire, on the other hand, sucks in inverse proportion to the originality and fun of its forebear; it even fits-in footage from 300 in its wraparound story to prove these two movies are related. There is also an overbearing voice-over that verges on parody, as do more color-coordinated good/bad guy combinations (Athenian blue capes and Spartan red capes = good; Persian black unitards = bad), and there’s a tired reliance on get-up-and-fight speeches that date back at least to “Henry V.”
The root of ROAE’s problems is that it spends too much time informing us that 300 exists when, presumably, a good portion of the audience already knows this. Then ROAE complicates a potentially simple story line with three time periods spread across 10 years in order to expand on reasons why an audience might want to watch swords hack away animal flesh. Answer: because cloven heads and sundered legs are cool in the way all spectacle in a movie is cool.
Important sidebar: when we visit the digiverse, or a story world that exists wholly because of Computer Generated Imagery with no index to our actual lived experience, everyday expectations change. Gone are the requirements of “truth” that might guide us through a setting as if we were walking through an actual locale, which is impossible to do, anyway, because the digiverse is inside a bank of computers. Gone, too, are physical restrictions since every vantage and focal length can be achieved with enough time and money to orient CGI artists. And artists they are, for so often their digiverse extends beyond a lame story, elevating simple slug lines in a script (“The Athenian army fights the Persians,” for example) into breathtaking visual design that supersaturates human input signals.
So, ROAE is about Athenian general Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton)—he of the scruffy beard, blue eyes, and six-pack abs—who once led the Greeks in the Battle of Marathan (490 B.C.E.), at the conclusion of which he killed Persian King Darius, which is historically untrue, but hey, this is the digiverse.
Then Darius’s son, Xerxes(Rodrigo Santoro), vows vengeance and turns to his consigliore, Artemisia (Eva Green), a Greek sex slave-turned-military genius, to guide him into the war that previously yielded the movie 300, a shocking defeat of Xerxes’s army, although he remains hellbent on conquering the peninsular collection of city-states, this time by way of a naval assault.
What follows are civic pride devotionals in Athens and in Sparta, whereby muscled men wearing underpants argue between the virtues of isolationism versus military engagement. Then the navies of Greece and Persia mix it up, finally leading to the Battle of Salamis (480 B.C.E.), which is where the real-life Persians, in a real chapter of actual world history, were defeated, forcing the end of that nation’s colonial designs on that part of Southern Europe. Highlights along this fight-heavy narrative include a horse-hoof head crush, many beheadings and head-splittings, Ms. Green’s turn as a dominatrix-sword master-seducer, Mr. Stapleton’s teeth (and, through them, some of the most convincing good acting through bad lines this viewer has suffered in some time), and lots of naval maneuvers through cloud banks and rocky shoals over waves and even under the surface of the ocean.
In the end, when you encounter ROAE on basic cable, you may agree that it is just entertaining enough to make staying awake past your bedtime enjoyable. If it yields a sequel, perhaps it will be called “300 Mostly Naked Men Bleeding in Search of Reason.”
–February 28, 2021
