By Preston Wilder
Mea culpa. I’m deeply embarrassed, and apologise to everyone involved with this (rather belated) sequel to 300. ‘Of course the Persians didn’t burn down Athens!’ I claimed in the foyer after the screening, feeling very authoritative as I mentally combed through my primary-school Ancient History – but in fact they did, just before the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. The film is right, and I was wrong. All I can say in my defence is that Xerxes’ troops didn’t burn down the entire city (and Athens was deserted in any case, the Athenians having already fled), so it wasn’t such a big deal – and of course 300: Rise of an Empire is so indefensibly lurid in all other respects that it’s easy to assume the worst of it. I’m sure it would’ve shown the Persians burning down Athens, even if they hadn’t actually done so.
So much for that little faux pas. I think I’m right in saying, however, that women in the ancient world weren’t quite as empowered as they are in this movie. Lena Headey is Queen Gorgo, left in charge of Sparta while Leonidas is off at Thermopylae (the action in the sequel takes place in parallel with 300), while Eva Green is Artemisia, who’s in charge of the entire Persian fleet. She’s a match for any man, even – or especially – Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton), the Athenian general who refuses to join her even when she grabs his hair, rips off his tunic and cries: “Join me!”. Artemisia is good in a scrap, a point she proves by slitting an opponent’s throat then cutting off his head, kissing it full on the lips then chucking the severed head away like a piece of fruit. Xerxes, on the other hand, is a mincing baldy who looks like he wears mascara, while Themistocles … well, let’s just say Artemisia has a point when she notes that “you fight better than you f***”.
Men tend to be a bit emasculated here, which is quite amusing after the virulent machismo of 300. This is Athens, of course, not Sparta, a distinction turned into a joke when we catch a glimpse of hand-to-hand combat, a splash of blood fills the screen – then our hero sighs and mutters “Spartans…” Athenians are democrats, not savages: it was “all for an idea: a free Greece,” exhorts the voice-over. “An Athenian experiment called democracy.”
This seems like a good place to point out that the Persians have a suicide bomber (a soldier who climbs aboard a Greek ship and blows himself up), and that the sound of a muezzin can be dimly discerned on the soundtrack in a couple of scenes – and also, perhaps, to point out that director Noam Murro is Israeli, and presumably knows a thing or two about militant Islam. But you couldn’t really call the film political, not when it’s such a gleeful comic-book: sex and (especially) violence are off the charts, the battles splashed with slippery globs of CGI blood coming at the camera in slo-mo arcs and gushes.
300 itself was arty-looking but staunchly militaristic; the sequel is something else, despite the narrator’s talk of “a tidal wave of heroes’ blood”. The homoerotic subtext that was always there is now made explicit, soldierly values mostly mocked in favour of camp (Xerxes nibbles on a chicken drumstick; the Aegean turns out to harbour sea monsters) and unchecked ultra-violence. Times have changed in the eight years since 300 came out; gore is now mainstream, thanks to the TV success of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead – but the public appetite for a righteous War on Terror is almost non-existent.
Rise of an Empire is cheerfully decadent, a film where life is cheap and violence is aestheticised, a film without a single redeeming feature except the fact that it’s naughty fun (though it does get tedious after an hour or so). It’s a juicy entertainment, an outrageous piss-take blended with a war movie. There’s a rousing St. Crispin’s Day speech (“We choose to die on our feet rather than live on our knees!”), and clichés like famous last words for those wounded in battle, though the emphasis on tactics seems a bit misplaced: even attacking from the side and trying to ram enemy vessels in the middle, it seems wildly unlikely that 50 Greek ships could’ve defeated an armada of 1,000 Persian ships – but maybe that’s exactly what happened at the Battle of Salamis. If the Persians burned down Athens, anything is possible.
DIRECTED BY Noam Murro
STARRING Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Lena Headey
US 2014 102 mins
