{"id":29769,"date":"2014-03-10T10:37:13","date_gmt":"2014-03-10T14:37:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=29769"},"modified":"2014-03-10T10:37:13","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T14:37:13","slug":"300-rise-of-an-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2014\/03\/300-rise-of-an-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201c300: Rise of an Empire\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 2007\u2019s \u201c300\u201d told the story of a small Spartan army that stood up to an insurmountable Persian army.\u00a0 The rebellion didn\u2019t go very well. The ending set the stage for a sequel where armies from other Greek cities would band together to face the Persians with better odds. \u201c300: Rise of an Empire\u201d is not that sequel. It tells the story of a small Athenian army that stands up to a different version of the insurmountable Persian army around the same time as the Spartan army. The first film was dumb and violent. The new film is also dumb and violent, with the added failure of being unoriginal. One \u201c300\u201d is more than enough.<\/p>\n

The Athenian army is led by Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton), who killed off the leader of a Persian army years before. He\u2019s hailed as a hero, but secretly he\u2019s consumed by guilt for not killing the leader\u2019s son Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, the only cast member from the original \u201c300\u201d with a role bigger than a cameo), who has since become much more tyrannical that his father ever was. The Persian army, under the supervision of Xerxes, is led by Artemisia (Eva Green), a lifelong warrior who manipulates Xerxes into becoming a tyrant. And yes, the movie does expect you to keep track of names like \u201cThemistokles\u201d and \u201cArtemisia.\u201d When the most retainable name in your story is \u201cXerxes,\u201d things might be too complicated.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The film mostly consists of battles, buildup for battles or damage assessment immediately following battles. It\u2019s in these scenes where Green really gnashes her teeth as Artemisia. I refuse to say that there is anything good about this movie, but Green is the closest thing to a good thing. The problem is that she rarely does anything right in these battles, and her formidability suffers because of it. Themistokles, meanwhile, spends a lot of time stuck in a subplot about the son of one of his officers tagging along without permission. It\u2019s a lame storyline, but I guess it\u2019s better than watching him mope around because he let Xerxes live. Xerxes, for his part, is pretty useless as the film is determined drive home the point that Artemisia has him under her thumb. The wimp-ification of this once mighty character is akin to the widely disliked final scenes of Bane in \u201cThe Dark Knight Rises.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now we come to the part that people pay their money to see: the action sequences. Truthfully, there isn\u2019t much here that wasn\u2019t in the original \u201c300.\u201d There\u2019s swordplay galore, and I guess the film comes up with some new ways to skewer people, but is that really something to be proud of? There\u2019s also a ton of blood in these scenes but it looks like ink, not precious life fluid. The blades don\u2019t even look like they hurt that much. I think it\u2019s because the characters usually fight wearing black so blood doesn\u2019t show up on their clothes. Highlights of the battle scenes are shown in animation over the credits, and they\u2019re actually much easier to watch than the rest of the movie.<\/p>\n

\u201c300: Rise of an Empire\u201d is just an unpleasant experience. The plot is confusing, the photography is murky, the battles get boring quickly and Sullivan Stapleton is no match for Gerard Butler as a leading man. Perhaps most insulting is that the film promises that a battle featuring a united Greece is coming, and it turns out that they\u2019re saving it for the next movie. I\u2019m not mad at the idea of not seeing the battle so much as I\u2019m mad that I\u2019ll have to see another one of these movies.<\/p>\n

One Star out of Five.<\/p>\n

\u201c300: Rise of an Empire\u201d is rated R for strong sustained sequences of stylized bloody violence throughout, a sex scene, nudity and some language. Its running time is 102 minutes.<\/p>\n

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 2007\u2019s \u201c300\u201d told the story of a small Spartan army that stood up to an insurmountable Persian army.\u00a0 The rebellion didn\u2019t go very well. The ending… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29769"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}