300: Rise of an Empire Review
Slow Motion a go-go!
Have you ever gone to a truly epic party on a Friday night? One that you could consider one of the best of your life? An amazing house, great music, lots of cool people, hot chicks, and all the greatest food, booze, and drugs you could ever want? The kind of party where you have nothing but fun and excitement with no real repercussions or consequences? You know, the kind of party where the next day I say to myself “Wow, I almost got laid last night!” (wait is this keyboard on? Dammit! Image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category BTW).
Anyway, ever go to that amazing party and the next morning while basking in the afterglow (or puking up your hangover) you get a call from That Guy? You know who That Guy is. The guy who also had a blast and is 100% convinced that he can make lightning strike twice by throwing the exact same party the very next night, little realizing that most of the people who made it fun either are recovering or recognize him as That Guy and opt to stay in or do something else super fun and cool that I am not invited to. Also his house sucks, the only music he plays is his weird Spotify mix or his neighbor’s kid’s band, the booze is all the cheapest swill available, the drugs either scary or non-existent, and the only food he has is stale chips, cold pizza, and frozen cheese-and-broccoli Hot Pockets with no microwave. Sure, a few of the same people showed up and you can talk about the amazing party you went to last night but really you just stand around looking at each other and wishing you could go back in time 24 hours.
That’s pretty much what 300: Rise of an Empire is. The next day after party no one really wanted. It sort of has a similar greasy feel to it but beyond the fact that it’s bare chested Greeks swinging swords at Persians it is not the same amazing scene and you spend most of the movie wishing you were watching the original. I originally thought that this was another Zack Snyder event but once I ground my way through it to the extremely predictable ending I looked it up and realized Zack only has a writing credit. No, directing credit goes to some dude named Noam Murro, who has done 0.00 action movies and mostly did a couple of HBO movies (one of which was a documentary) and a Dennis Quaid film called Smart People, which netted less than $10 mil.
I know I rail against this every time I see a crap movie with a huge budget but see if you can follow the logic for me. You are a senior executive at Warner Bros. You green light a film and give it a $100,000,000 budget. You are looking for a director. You look at a list of people and think “You know who would be perfect for directing this $100,000,000 film production? Some guy who no one has ever heard of, has never done an action or adventure film, and who’s total box office receipts to date are about 1/10th of the money we are about to hand him. How perfect is that?” Seriously, this is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. Is there anyone out there who works in the movie industry who can shed some light on this for me? I will respect your anonymity but I really don’t think I can take Hollywood seriously if I don’t understand what combination of drugs and stupidity leads to these decisions.
Not to say that Warner is going to lose their investment. Thanks to the brain damaged decision making process that you, the American movie going audience, engages in it is proven that any sequel will automatically rake in 60% of the take of the original regardless of the merit of the film. 300 brought in $70 million its opening weekend. This turd is on track to earn $40 million, which is 57.1% of the original. Do any of you ever feel guilty for catering to a stereotype? On a completely unrelated note I cannot wait for the new Captain America sequel. It is going to be epic.
Before seeing this film last night I was talking about it with a couple friends who are active Frank Miller readers and they told me that his later work has been getting more and more misogynistic. After seeing this I can totally believe that as every woman in this film is either a murderous, evil sociopathic bitch or a rape victim. That says a lot about how Frank Miller and Noam Murro feel about women. There is a death scene where a very blunt and phallic sword is thrust through a woman in a blatant call back to a previous brutal sex scene. I find this attitude towards women ironic since the only redeeming feature of this film was apparent woman Eva Green. She stole every scene and was awesome. She also gave us a truly amazing nude scene and is the new love of my life (sexist I may or may not be, but definitely not misogynist. I love women).
This is a film that ironically suffers under the weight of it’s predecessor. 300 was such a huge success and pretty much established what a Greek or Roman film is supposed to look like that now every film has sweaty, bloody bare chested men hacking at each other in slow motion. This is the third film I have seen this year that could be considered “influenced” by 300 (fourth if you count Son of God) and honestly I am getting really tired of it. This film latches onto its predecessor like a tapeworm and spends most of the film sucking nutrients from 300’s small intestine. The call backs to the good film came with the rapidity and subtlety of a mini gun fired into a six foot block of soft cheese. Some directors might take pride in creating his own film and treat the call backs as the crutches they are but such distinctions are a waste of time for this team.
I’m also going to take issue with the title of this film and what exactly it is supposed to be. The film starts out 10 years before 300 and seems to imply we are going to see a film about the rise of the Persian empire but then it skips forward to the exact time of the Battle of Thermopylae. As far as I can tell the empire exists. Is this a prequel or what? A sidequel? I can tell you there was no sign of any empire rising in this film, so you can understand my simple minded confusion as to the words “rise”, “of”, “an”, and “empire” used in this title.
Also remember how 300 was about 300 Spartan warriors holding off the Persian army in a choke point? Well, now it’s about how Xerxes is the creation of some magic or god crap. Remember how the Battle of Thermopylae occurred in 480 BC? Well now we have prehistoric sea monsters because…well you know. Sharks are boring.
Anyway, one more thing and then I will get into the film. Let’s talk about filming and editing techniques. 300 more or less pushed the whole fast/slow motion action technique. It was used well and really enhanced the film. Well, this movie took that technique and has stretched it out to include literally every scene that does not actually involved people speaking. I’m not kidding when I say every freaking scene that does not have dialog is done in slow motion. Guy walking down a corridor? Slow motion. An exciting scene of oars hitting the water (done over and over again)? Slow motion. Ships crashing into each other? Slow motion. This film went a fairly measly 102 minutes but if you ran the whole film at real speed I doubt it would have been even an hour.
Oh, yeah. If you see this film I hope your favorite colors are grey, grey blue, and grey green because you are going to see a lot of it. The entire film felt like I was watching it from the other side of a fish tank in desperate need of cleaning. Even the blood looked grey. It honestly would have been less monochrome had they shot it in black and white. At least then our imagination might have filled in some color and we could have believed it was done for artistic rather than incompetent reasons.
I guess we can get into the story. The story starts off with the old king of Persia Darius (Igor Naor-Munich, Rendition, Green Zone) at the Battle of Marathon getting his ass handed to him by the Greeks. Thermistokles (Sullivan Stapleton-Strike Back, Gangster Squad, Animal Kingdom) is the Greek general and he picks up a bow and slow motion shoots Darius in the chest right in front of his loving son Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro-I Love You Phillip Morris, Rio, The Last Stand). Xerxes is heartbroken and once Darius finally shuffles off this mortal coil bitch admiral Atemisia (Eva Green-Casino Royale, Dark Shadows, Perfect Sense, my future wedding (hopefully)) convinces him that in order to challenge the Greeks he must become a god. He wanders the desert and takes a bath in magic fire water, emerging as the Bedazzled bald dude we know from the other film.
Skip forward 10 years and now it is up to the Athenians to beat his navy at sea while the Spartans hold him off via land. The Athenians are outnumbered like 50 ships to one but put their ships in a big circle like covered wagons and use that to defeat the first wave. Atemisia chucks her first general overboard and lets the next guy step forward and fail. At that point she goes on a diatribe lamenting the fact that she doesn’t have a man strong enough for her. She invites Themistokle to her ship for a parlay and they lay some pipe. He then rejects her offer to be her second in command and heads back to his navy. The next day blood is spilled, ships get rammed (more massively Freudian imagery BTW. The director of this film has phallus’s on his mind I think), and the “surprise” ending that they had been setting up since the end of the introduction surfaces. I won’t spoil it for you but if you can predict that a skunk is going to stink you will know how this film will end.
The stars:
I’m just going to say it; Eva Green saved this film from being a complete and utter disaster of Baby Geniuses caliber, and I’m not just talking about her topless scene. Every scene with her in it was fun to watch, which had the negative side benefit of making all the rest of the scenes that much harder to witness. However this section is about things the movie did right, and what they did right was cast Eva Green and give her a lot of screen time. Two stars. Eva Green’s topless scene (hey that rhymes!). One star. A lot of the action was pretty good if you are not already stuffed to the gills with Zack Snyder slow motion sword fighting. One star. I guess it was kind of fun to see some of the 300 characters, just like seeing a few of the people from the party the night before can be fun. One star. In spite of everything else it was based on actual events and kind of got most of it right. The Athenians did fight a navel battle while the Spartans were getting massacred. One star. Total: six stars.
The black holes:
The story and characters made very little attempt to engage the audience, at least as well as 300 did. One black hole. Except for Eva Green there was not a single character I cared lived or died. Thermistokles was either another bare chested Greek or annoying me with another “inspirational” speech. One black hole. The speechifying to really old really fast. One black hole. If you have a fear of losing your color vision this is not the film for you. Monochrome hell. One black hole. The misogamy has to be pretty blatant for me to notice and I was seeing it all over the place. Also enough with the phallic imagery Mr. Murro. We get it. Mommy and daddy didn’t love you enough. One black hole. This film was shot almost entirely in slow motion, a trend I find ugly as in most films I find myself wishing for a fast forward button. One black hole. The addition of magic and dinosaurs did nothing for this film. One thing I liked about the 300 was the fact that it could have been how events played out. If I want magic I’ll go back and watch the LOTRs. One black hole. This film couldn’t have stuffed in another call back or reference to 300 without bursting at the seams. One black hole. Also the whole father/son thing was a complete rip off of the first movie and 100% worthless. One black hole. Can someone please tell me what empire is supposed to be rising in this film? The Persian empire pretty much stayed established the whole time. One black hole. The addition of the “we fight for freedom and democracy” that the Athenians kept banging on about felt really out of place and annoying. How about you fight because the Persians want to conquer you? Seems like motivation enough. One black hole. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see how this film is going to end. Maybe it’s just me but predictable=boring. One black hole. Total: twelve black holes.
So six black holes total. Was it really that bad? Meh, probably not although I held myself back on the black holes. For example I didn’t ding them for completely worthless 3D. If you can’t get enough of slow motion swordplay and shades of grey is a turn on you will enjoy it. Most of my bile comes from the fact that this film is an insult rather than a tribute to the first amazing film. Date movie? Only if misogamy and rape turn her on. This film was made for dudes. Bathroom break? That’s easy. Any time you see Themistokles on the shore inspiring his men or making plans is the prefect place to bug out for a bit. Don’t miss the scene where he visits Artemisia on her ship or you will have missed most of the reason to see this flick.
Thanks for reading. Long one today but the films where I feel personally insulted tend to be the extended reviews. Join the tens of Twitter people who follow me @Nerdkungfu. Comments on this film or my review are welcomed and can be posted below. Off topic questions or suggestions can be sent to [email protected]. I’ll see Peabody some time this weekend and write it up, and am thinking about going over the Golden Raspberry results too. That should be fun. Have a great weekend.
Dave
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.