“Seize your glory!” the poster for 300: Rise of an Empire shouts. The film, directed by Noam Murro from a screenplay by Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad, arrives eight years after 300 and asks a question nobody in 2006 thought to ask: what was the Persian navy doing while Leonidas held the pass?
The answer runs 102 minutes. It is a sequel that takes place before, during and after the first film. It is based on Frank Miller’s comic limited series Xerxes. It is a fictionalized retelling of the Battle of Artemisium and the Battle of Salamis. Warner Bros. released it theatrically on March 7, 2014.
It grossed $337 million worldwide against a $110 million budget. That is a success by any measure. It is also not the measure that matters here.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Themistocles Sails for Artemisium
Sullivan Stapleton plays Themistocles, the Athenian general who killed King Darius of Persia at Marathon. Queen Gorgo of Sparta, played again by Lena Headey, narrates that battle. Darius’s son Xerxes watches his father die and is advised never to wage war against the Greeks. He does not take the advice.
Rodrigo Santoro returns as Xerxes. Artemisia, the Persian naval commander, persuades him to become a god and sends him into the desert. He reaches a cave, bathes in an otherworldly liquid, and emerges as a God-King. He goes home and declares war on Greece to avenge his father.
Themistocles wants a fleet. He meets with the council and convinces them to give him one, so he can fight the Persians at sea. He travels to Sparta to ask Leonidas for help. Dilios, played by David Wenham, tells him Leonidas is consulting the Oracle. Gorgo is reluctant to side with Athens.
So Themistocles goes to sea with fifty warships and several thousand men. Among them are Scyllias, played by Callan Mulvey, who infiltrated the Persian troops; Scyllias’s son Calisto, played by Jack O’Connell; and Aeschylus, Themistocles’ right-hand man. The Battle of Artemisium begins.
Artemisia Was Born Greek
Eva Green plays Artemisia, and the film gives her the backstory to carry it. Scyllias reveals she was born Greek. Her family was murdered by Greek hoplites. A Persian emissary took her in and trained her. She rose to become the commander of the Persian navy.
That is the film’s one genuinely interesting piece of architecture. The sequel’s antagonist is a Greek who chose the other side, and the sequel’s hero is a Greek trying to unite the sides she abandoned. Themistocles wants a pan-Greek alliance. Artemisia is the proof that the word Greek was never a single thing to begin with.
Green is the reason to watch. She plays Artemisia as a commander who has already decided everything and is merely waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. When she brings Themistocles onto her ship and tries to seduce him, the scene works because Green plays it as a negotiation, not a seduction. She is offering him a deal. He is too stubborn to hear it.
Fifty Warships and a Crevice
The naval battles are the film’s engine, and they are staged with more clarity than the first film’s land combat. Themistocles’ fleet rams the Persian ships and attacks before retreating. The next day the Greeks feign a retreat and lead the Persian ships into a crevice, where the Persians get stuck. The Greeks attack from the cliffs above.
That is the best sequence in the movie. It is a trap built out of terrain, and it understands that a naval battle is a problem of geometry before it is a problem of courage. Murro shoots it wide. You can see the whole board.
The rest of the film cannot match it. The politics — Themistocles lobbying the council, then Sparta, then his own captains — is a series of rooms where men explain the stakes to each other. The first film had the same problem and solved it with Leonidas. This film has no Leonidas. It has Themistocles, and Themistocles is a diplomat.
What the Returning Cast Carries
The returning players do what they can with limited screen time.
- Lena Headey as Queen Gorgo, narrating and withholding Spartan help
- David Wenham as Dillios, delivering the news about the Oracle
- Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes, now a God-King
- Andrew Tiernan as Ephialtes
- Andrew Pleavin as Daxos
- Peter Mensah as the Persian Emissary
Hans Matheson plays Aesyklos and Ashraf Barhom plays General Bandari. The film has a deep bench and uses maybe half of it. Gorgo in particular is a narrator and a veto, not a character. Headey made her name on a different throne, and this film gives her nothing to sit on.
Stapleton Plays Themistocles Too Steady
Stapleton is the film’s central problem. Themistocles is written as a man who talks his way into a war, and the script needs him to be charismatic enough to make the talking work. Stapleton plays him as steady. Steady is the wrong register for a film that opens with a god being made in a cave.
The film’s own tagline is “Seize your glory!” Themistocles never seizes anything. He accumulates it. He is a committee chairman who happens to own a fleet, and the film keeps asking us to feel the fire in him without ever showing it.
Compare that to Green, who seizes every frame she is in. The gap between the two performances is the gap between the film’s ambition and its execution.
The Gore Is Not the Problem
The film’s visual style has been criticized as overstylized, and the criticism is fair but misdirected. The problem is not the blood. The problem is that the blood is the only thing the film is confident about.
Every battle is shot in the same palette. Every ship looks like every other ship. The first film had a distinct visual grammar — the speed-ramping, the silhouettes, the monochrome — and it felt like a comic book page in motion. This film inherits the grammar and forgets the reason for it. The slow motion arrives on schedule. It no longer means anything.
The gore, meanwhile, is plentiful and weightless. Bodies are cut, impaled and thrown, and none of it registers. A war film where the killing is decorative has given up on the war.
Three Timelines, One Idea
300: Rise of an Empire is a prequel, a midquel and a sequel at once, and the structural ambition is the most interesting thing about it. It wants to show you the same war from the water, from the Persian court, and from Athens. That is a real idea.
It does not have the discipline to execute it. The film cuts between three timelines and never establishes why the order matters. Gorgo’s narration is a patch for information the script cannot dramatize. Xerxes’ transformation is a detour that pays off only in the first film’s terms.
What the film does have is Artemisia. Green takes a character who could have been a stock vengeance figure and gives her a coherent logic: she was made by Greek violence, so she has no reason to be loyal to Greek unity. Themistocles wants to unite Greece. Artemisia is what Greece did to the people it did not unite. That is a better movie than the one around her.
300: Rise of an Empire is a $337 million success that plays like a $110 million compromise. The naval battles at Artemisium and Salamis are staged with real spatial intelligence, and the crevice trap is the best-constructed set piece in either film. Eva Green is the only performer who seems to know what movie she is in, and she is right.
Everything else is a committee. Stapleton is asked to carry a film that needs a firebrand and delivers a civil servant. The returning cast — Headey, Wenham, Santoro, Tiernan, Pleavin, Mensah — are given cameos where they were promised roles. The visual style has become a house style, applied rather than meant. And the gore, which drew so much criticism, is not the issue; the issue is that the film has nothing under it.
The published critical score of 4.8 out of 10 is the right number, and the reason is not that the film is incompetent. It is that the film is competent at the wrong things. It knows how to build a trap and how to cast a villain. It does not know how to make you care which side of the Aegean you are on.
Worth watching for Green. Worth skipping for everything that is not her. The glory, as advertised, is not seized.
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