the m0vie blog

It is almost immediately apparent that 300: Rise of an Empire was not directed by Zack Snyder. Snyder is credited on the inter-quel’s screenplay, but Rise of an Empire is directed by Noam Murro. Murro’s only other feature-length directorial credit is the forgotten indie movie Smart People, which would hardly make a case for Murro as an obvious choice to succeed Snyder in the director’s chair.

300 was a lavish and rich (and surprisingly shrewd) visual feast – packed with iconic imagery and memorable mosaics, treating it’s muscle-bound stars as props for epic spectacle while casting a knowing look out at the audience. Rise of an Empire feels like an attempt at imitation rather than innovation – with a sense that Murro isn’t bold enough to put his own stamp on the film, instead trying to channel one of the most unique voices currently working in action movies.

Slice o’ life…

On a purely visual level, 300 was a feast. Like its contemporaneous Frank Miller adaptation, Sin City, it was a movie with a clear artistic vision and a distinctive voice. The picture was heavily stylised, looking unlike anything that had been produced before. If we are to be brutally honest, 300 still looks distinct – even amid the sea of imitators and copycats that have tried to capitalise on the success of that most unlikely cinematic blockbuster.

Rise of an Empire comes a lot closer than most of those imitators to capturing Snyder’s approach to the material. Murro provides a number of effective visuals and stunning CGI-rendered spectacles. He is very good at doing “Xerxes surveys his kingdom” shots, with two of the movie’s more memorable moments coming from shots of Xerxes looming over his dominion, cape billowing beneath him, creating the impression that the Persian is somehow part of the terrain itself. The opening shot of a sculpture morphing into a haunting still image is also effective and eye-catching.

GOLD! Always believe in your soul!

Sadly, too much of Murro’s work feels like a lifeless imitation of Snyder. This is most obvious when Murro tries to work with the imagery that Snyder used so effectively. Given the overlap between 300 and Rise of an Empire, that’s a considerable portion of the film.  The hunchback traitor Ephialtes, for example, was rendered as a grotesque horror by Snyder. Under Murro’s camera, he feels like a generic character under several pounds of make-up. Snyder made the Persian Immortals seem ethereal and otherly, genuinely unsettling and unnerving. Murro reduces them to generic baddies, even giving them some broad comedy to play.

It is worth noting that Rise of an Empire seems to go out of its way to mitigate some of the criticism levelled at its predecessor. The decision to reduce the ethereal and haunting presentation of characters like Ephialtes and the Immortals might have been a conscious effort to tone done some of the more uncomfortable aspects of 300, a film frequently attacked for being racist or culturally insensitive.

Facing the chop…

In response to allegations accusing the film of racist portrayals of the Persians, Rise of an Empire seems to try to compensate. Xerxes, with his gold chains and strange proportions, is presented as a marked oddity – particular in contrast to the more “human” looking Persian characters around him. His father, Darius, looks like a fairly normal person. The primary antagonist of the film is a Greek woman named Artemisia – and her back story exists to assure viewers that the Greeks could be just as monstrous as the Persians they face. The Immortals are no longer walking monsters, but simply gimmick henchmen.

This has a somewhat paradoxical effect. In toning down the exaggeration of the portrayal of the Persians, there’s a sense that Rise of an Empire is trying to ground itself. The original 300 was told through a framing device – inviting to witness the conflict as seen through the eyes of Dilios, the Spartan storyteller. Of course it was jingoistic and xenophobic, as it was essentially a piece of propaganda told by a society that deemed it “civilised” to send their children into the wild and who kept their own slaves and practised many of the hedonistic actions they accused the Persians of perpetrating.

A straight shooter…

In short, the racial subtext of 300 felt deeply ironic – as if trusting the audience to realise that Dilios’ narrative might just be a little self-serving and manipulative. While Snyder may not be the strongest storyteller working in contemporary Hollywood, he has a knack for irony. After all, Man of Steel reads as well as a condemnation and criticism of its protagonist as an ode to Superman. It seems even more cynical and bitter than Superman Returns. Singer’s film simply suggested Superman was terrifying and truly alien on an interpersonal level, while Snyder suggested that Superman was a horrifying concept on the broadest possible scale.

Although one can see traces of that irony in Snyder’s script for Rise of an Empire. For all the rhetoric about protecting democracy, our first visit to Athens suggests (correctly) that Athenian democracy was hardly an ideal. However, there’s a sense that Murro lacks the technical craft to carry off that sort of self-aware subversiveness. Snyder’s script frames Rise of an Empire as a story recounted to Spartan soldiers on their way to war, but this isn’t a clever self-aware storytelling device in the way that Dilios’ narration was.

Kneel before Xerxes…

Instead, the narration feels a little surreal and pointless. We spend considerable time listening to stories within stories. At one point, a character tells another character about the very first part of the story, and so we end up getting a flashback (complete with a repeat of the slow motion “noooooo!”) within our flashback. This doesn’t seem clever or self-aware or even playful. It just feels like a muddle.

While 300 kept most of its narrative focused on Leonidas, Rise of an Empire is too diffuse to work as a single story told about a single viewpoint of one event. Although the story is told by the Spartans, it doesn’t feel anchored to their perspective. We take a trip to Persia to attend to Xerxes’ secret origin, at one point. There are several extended sequences that unfold where it’s hard to imagine our narrator could have gleaned the second-hand information.

An impressive body of work…

Throughout the story, the Athenian values of “democracy” and “freedom” are taken at face value and presented as unquestionable absolutes. This would make sense if the Athenians were telling the story – if they were crafting the narrative in their own relativist terms – but the movie goes out of its way to inform us that the Spartans have little time for these concepts. So it seems weird for a story being told to Spartans by Spartans espouses a central viewpoint so firmly anchored in the perspective of their rival city-state and grudging ally.

So, in short, there is no defence for the more awkward aspects of Rise of an Empire, with the movie lacking the clever self-awareness that disarmed so many of the criticisms about 300. There are points where it seems like Murro might be cleverly making a subversive point. During an Athenian speech about freedom, we cut to the slaves powering the ship. However, that’s just dodgy editing. The slaves are being exploited by the Persians, with little acknowledgement of the fact that Athenian democracy was only a good thing if you you were a free male land-owner.

Worlds collide…

(This makes some of the movie’s more clumsy stabs at contemporary imagery feel a little ham-fisted. At one point, the Athenian fleet find themselves under attack from suicide bombers. The political and racial subtext is uncomfortable, to say the least – and it feels far more unsettling than any of the exoticism at play in the original 300.)

One of the more interesting aspects of Rise of an Empire is the fact that it is loosely based on Frank Miller’s long-delayed Xerxes novel. It remains incomplete at the time of writing. Given Miller’s tendency to wander away from projects that have ceased to hold his interest, it’s hard to know if the comic will ever be fully published. Given that it has not been released, it’s hard to know how much (if any) of Rise of an Empire is rooted in Miller’s writing. However, the script does make use of some of Miller’s less-than-endearing storytelling tropes.

Looks like we have a Persian (cultural) gulf…

In many ways, Eva Green’s Artemisia feels like the archetypal Frank Miller female character. Artemisia is defined as brutal and violent, but also as a victim of past sexual trauma. One of the more frequent criticisms of Miller’s writing, at least before 9/11, was that there was an uncomfortably sexist undertone to his work. This is most obvious in stories like Sin City or Batman: Year One. Artemisia’s origin by rape feels like particularly tasteless bit of character back story, thrown out so casually and with little real consideration.

It’s a shame, as Green does great work here. Green gives the best performance in the film as the movie’s nominal villain – a character waging a one-woman war against Greece and refusing to yield, while propping up and maintaining the throne of a male character. It’s not the most nuanced or developed of roles, but Green relishes the opportunity to ham it up, and to chew on the scenery. As with Dark Shadows, there’s a campy enthusiasm to her performance that is almost endearing.

When Xerxes saw the breadth of his domain, he wept…

As such, it’s disappointing that none of the rest of the cast really distinguish themselves. The role of Leonidas might not have demanded much, but Gerard Butler was ideally suited to playing an alpha-male jock in a red cape and a leather diaper. Sullivan Stapleton lacks that sort of screen presence, and Themistokles feels particularly one-dimensional. It’s always great to see Lena Headey, but her work here seems almost phoned in – along with most of the other cameos the film could muster from actors who appeared in 300.

There is something very interesting about the structure of Rise of an Empire. Hollywood franchises are fairly reliable machines, but it seems like they have changed quite a bit in recent years. In the old days, a popular film would earn a sequel. Spin-offs were rare, but they did happen. Only in the last few decades did prequels really take off as a credible avenue for film development, along with reboots. So this film feels a little strange.

You’d be amazed the doors that being Persian Emperor can open for you…

Rise of an Empire is very much a “side-quel“ to 300. It is both a prequel and a sequel to the film – it spans events leading up to the invasion of Greece by the Persians and picks up after the credits rolled on the first film. However, a significant portion of events unfold in parallel with the events of 300. Apparently Leonidas wasn’t the only Greek throwing Xerxes a “welcome to Greece” party. So there’s a significant overlap between the films, with several scenes from Rise of an Empire slotting neatly between scenes in 300. In that respect, it’s not unlike The Bourne Legacy.

This is by turns intriguing and frustrating. It’s frustrating, because the constant clips of Leonidas and his own last stand create a sense that we are only watching half of a film – and the weaker half at that. However, it’s also intriguing, because it manages to create a sense of a cinematic world that is much larger than a single two-hour film. It creates a sense that these characters live in a world where things happen outside their control, if only because there’s another story unfolding nearby. Like The Bourne Legacy, this is more unsatisfying than it is fascinating, but it does offer a demonstration of how franchises are evolving.

Storming the enemy…

Rise of an Empire can’t help but feel like an imitation of a superior film – an attempt to copy a movie that was so effective and so charming because it felt utterly unlike anything the audience had really experienced before.

Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: 300, 300: rise of an empire, athenians, empire, eva green, frank miller, greece, greek, lena headley, leonidas, Movie, non-review review, persians, racism, review, rise of an empire, sexism, Spartans |