‘Rise of an Empire’ falls flat
April 8, 2014
The follow up to 2006’s ‘300’ has finally hit theaters eight years later with ‘300: Rise of an Empire’. ‘Rise’ is based off of Frank Millers pseudo-sequel to ‘300’, ‘Xerxes,’ and covers the events that take place away from the Spartans, both with a preamble for Xerxes(Rodrigo Santoro), and the story of Themistocles(Sullivan Stapleton) and the naval battles of the second Persian invasion.
And this is where the problems begin for the movie. The movie opens with a history of both Xerxes and Themistocles given in a History Channel docudrama style given by Queen Gorgo(Lena Headley) to her soldiers before battle. Rather than making me care about Themistocles or his cause, as the first movie did for Leonidas, this makes Themistocles an unrelatable character from a history book. The pure amount of information in this forty minute run up before the main story kicks off only serves to confuse and bore viewers.
However, like the first film, this film seems to be more focused on the action sequences than the story, but even judged on this merit the film falls well short of the bar. The film uses some 3D blood effects, however they look the same, if not worse than the original film. It has been eight years since the original film came out, eight years of CGI improvements and innovations, and this level of poor blood effects, that looks more like oil or pudding than it does like blood, looks like it belongs on the SyFy Channel.
One very different part of the combat, is the inversion of the use of slow motion. In the original, the movement would be sped up, and all of the kills would be in slow motion. However, in ‘Rise’ the movement is in slow motion, and the kills are sped up. But these are not the only problems with the action scenes in this film. The original ‘300’ featured many battles, all of which were on land, however, ‘Rise’ features mostly naval battles. These consist of many boats crashing in to one another like a 78 car pileup, in order to form a platform for the soldiers to run on and fight as if they were on land. These battles are boring and uninspired with only one really cool and unique scene involving dumping oil into the water and lighting it a flame.
Most of these mistakes, however, could be excused if not for two scenes that were so jarring, and unenjoyable to watch, that the other mistakes the movie makes pales in comparison. The first was the films one sex scene. The scene is between Themistocles and the greek woman Artemisia (Eva Green), who is in charge of the Persian navy. The scene is set to music that was action packed, causing the scene to come off as almost violent. The scene is awkward to watch, but is also tonally jarring, as it cuts to two guards who obviously hear what is going on, and look awkwardly at each other.
The second scene that is unforgivable is a large landscape shot of a fleet of greek ships. The sails on the ship in the first part of the shot are black with a red delta symbol in the middle. Then after a cut to show reactions from the soldiers, the sails appear to be white on both sides. Finally after another cut, the sails are black again. It is astounding how any of this got through a professional video editing team.
On the whole, ‘Rise’ feels like a cheap imitation of the original. The story is boring and fails to create any connections with the characters. The action scenes are no better than the eight year old ones from the original. It is uninspired, uninteresting, and all in all a boring experience that isn’t worth seeing.
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