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Director Murro can speed-ramp like a champ, but gone is the level of abstraction that Snyder brought to the original - and with it, much of the visual interest. (As the overripe narration tells us, “Her ferocity was bested only by her beauty, her beauty matched only by her devotion to her king.”) Green, the ingénue of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers and the Bond girl with a brain from Casino Royale, has so much fun with the part that they should do a spinoff movie just about her.Īs for the battles themselves, once again they are highly stylized, though in a more humdrum way. The film has a fantastic ace card in Eva Green’s Artemisia - a magnificently vicious creation, an over-the-top badass who slices and dices her way through battle and then makes out with the severed heads of her vanquished enemies. (Answer: He walked into a hermits’ cave, there was a pool … these things happen.)įor all those attempts to lend additional context, Rise of an Empire actually feels more cartoonish than the original film, more eager to indulge in the base pleasures of an action flick. They all go to something called “wooooooh.”) Along the way, the movie flashes forward and backward, trying to explain the (made-up) reasons for the Persians’ second invasion of Greece, and filling in all-important details about how the Persian king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) got to be an eight-foot, fully shaved golden god. (By the way, nobody actually goes to “war” in Rise of an Empire. But it then shifts focus to what’s happening elsewhere in Greece, as the Athenian General Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) prepares for and then fights a massive Persian naval fleet led by the beautiful but ruthless Artemisia (Eva Green), a Greek slave turned Persian general. The film starts where 300 left off - with a bird’s-eye view of the Spartans and their King Leonidas lying dead in the wake of Thermopylae. The result, though, is a lot less interesting - its style more anonymous and its macho theatrics more predictable. This time, Snyder serves as producer and co-writer, and has turned over directing duties to Israeli director Noam Murro.
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That brings us to 300: Rise of an Empire, which is an altogether more coherent and less politically convoluted film than 300.
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It was kind of ridiculous, but Russian audiences apparently ate it up.) (Recently, the new Russian movie Stalingrad tried to do for WWII what 300 did for the ancient world. It worked so well that everybody and his mother has been aping it ever since. Snyder invested this rarefied stylistic conceit with a visceral kick: You admired the movement and cringed at the violence, even as you held the movie itself at arm’s length for its stupidity. Its speed-ramping lateral tracking shots resembled gory, 21st-century variations on Eadweard Muybridge’s studies in motion. For all its hormonally unbalanced political ideas, 300 had a visual purity. You sensed that, like a Chinese tattoo whose translation remains unknown, this stuff didn’t really mean anything to him: It just looked cool.Īnd bro, it did look cool. Don’t ask me how we managed to see ourselves in the outnumbered, outgunned resistance and our scattered and desperate enemy in the massive, well-armed invading horde it was a dark time for everybody.ĭid Snyder have any real idea of the loaded politics of his filmmaking, the hateful equation at the heart of 300? I’m not sure: He followed 300 up with a literal-minded adaptation of Alan Moore’s subversive comic book Watchmen.
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Sword and sandal movies weren’t exactly big business, but 300 captured something in the culture: The Iraq War was raging, and the film portrayed the beefy, noble Spartan warriors as brave Western heroes holding off a decadent, grotesque, beyond-Orientalized Persian army. Back in 2006, Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book 300, a macho reimagining of the battle between a small band of Spartans and the Persian army in Thermopylae, made for a most unlikely hit. And the worst thing about it is that Zack Snyder didn’t direct it.Īllow me to explain myself. The best thing about the new 300: Rise of an Empire is that Zack Snyder didn’t direct it.