On the one side, there's Themistokles, trying to forge a legion of Greek states and getting trouble from Lena Headey, reprising her role as Sparta's Queen Gorgo. 'Rise of an Empire' shows the sea battle, happening at around the same time. '300' showed the land battle, in which 300 Greeks attempted to stop a massive Persian army at Thermopylae.

The movie is not, strictly speaking, a sequel to '300,' in that it covers events concurrent with the previous film. '300: Rise of an Empire' is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller called 'Xerxes,' after the Persian king. (If you punch a woman in the face, is it a feminist statement to show that she can take it?) Green is fun to watch - she always is - but there's a point at which the caricature becomes the career, and that point is drawing closer. It's curious that a misogynistic stereotype from a century ago could still be offered to the public as an example of strong, powerful womanhood. With her black hair, pale white skin and murderous ways, she looks like the women in Edvard Munch's lithographs and acts like a vampiric femme fatale of the early 20th century. The movie's one genuine point of interest is perverse, and that's Eva Green's performance as the evil Artemisia, the naval commander heading the Persian attack on the Greek city states. If you want to know who's winning, the only way to tell is to see which general is smiling. '300: Rise of an Empire' becomes a succession of battle scenes, filmed in tight medium shots, so that all you see is commotion.

Trying to out-Zack Zack, he replaces Snyder's rose petals with gushes of blood and muted colors with murk. The movie's muted colors and Snyder's use of a digital rose-petal effect, instead of blood, in the battle scenes, evoked the story's origins as a graphic novel, while suggesting something far away, as though we were seeing, not the events themselves, but their memory.īut as is often the case with a novice action director, Murro overcompensates for his inexperience.

Sequel to rise of an empire movie