300: Rise of an Empire is a side-story and a sequel to the original 300… telling a concurrent naval engagement that happened at the same time as the Battle of Thermopylae (as depicted quite accurately *snort* in 300)… and then the events that followed it. The movie is historically accurate (*snort*), 30% less yellie, 50% drummier… about as bloody ‘n gory (in that special CGI blood sort of way), and about 50% less hyper macho than the macho he-man 300 (the trailer for which caused beards to grow spontaneously on pre-pubescent boys AND girls).

Is this a good movie? The debate may rage for the ages… no. It’s not a “good” movie – it’s a loud, stylish, trashy movie full of blood and muscle and sexy sexy sexy time hate sex. It tells the minimal amount of story needed to show us huge, hyper-stylized action set pieces full of wooden ships and iron men (who should be wearing more armor but that wouldn’t be very 300, would it?). It’s big, it’s loud, it’s dumb, and any similarity between actual naval warfare and what goes on this movie are no-doubt pretty coincidental (and I’m about 95% sure the remix of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs that plays during the end credits may not be historically accurate either).

But a funny thing happened in this movie… i mentioned it’s about 50% less macho than 300. That’s partially because the soldiers depicted here are Not-Spartans (less 6-packed men from the other city-states) but it’s mainly because Eva Green is the frickin’ bomb, yo. Eva Green – who played Vesper Lynde in Casino Royale – plays Artemisia – the enemy naval commander (who apparently really existed and really was a naval commander under Xerxes, historically). She’s easily the most interesting character in the movie. So much more interesting (and campily awesome) that she makes the movie. When she (and her copious eye-shadow and fetish gear) is not on screen, the drama is eh so-so. Put her on screen and suddenly the villain is kind of the hero… I was mixed… I wanted her to kick all the ass and win all the battles… yet she was one of them evil Persians fighting the Greeks because they hate FREEDOM!

But I can’t deny it – she’s far more interesting than the hairy – and hairless – men and she raises the bar on the movie to something actually pretty good…. or, if not good, at least entertaining.

Lena Heady (aka Queen Cersie on Game of Thrones) returns as Queen Gorgo – Queen of Sparta and she gets to be more active in the second half and turns into a kind of badass of her own. Between her and Eva Green, this might even be a secret feminist movie in a way that people accuse 300 of being a big dumb gay movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi2t58CRmbU).

Visually, the movie has that hyper-stylized painterly CGI thing that 300 had… though less artistically bold… but certainly showing the improvement in visual effects since the first film. There’s a lot of detail here and the amount of debris and destruction they introduce (as stylized and intentionally not-quite-real) really is impressive. Ultimately this is a better movie in this regard that it first appeared in the trailers – what looked kind of like an quickie, low budget sequel tuned out a lot better looking than expected.

Action-wise, it’s all fine. The stakes are ultimately a lot less interesting and that’s partly the fault of the script and the setup. 300 works on the level it works because of the classic story of 300 men vs. an army. Here we kind of have an navy of indeterminate size against a bigger navy of indeterminate size and a lot of hairless, well-oiled men who have to fight a bunch of bad guys sensibly wearing more armor. It doesn’t have whatever desperate stakes 300 managed to cobble together. If you’re the kind of person who can just go with the action, there’s plenty here and it looks good. If you need stakes, it’s not as interesting… except (as I mentioned) for Eva Green’s character and she’s the bad guy.

So, there ya go. I fully expected to give this a fairly low score based on exceedingly low expectations and that feeling this movie just didn’t need to exist. But it works on enough levels and Eva Green pulls off a cool enough (over-the-top) performance that I have to give it a decent score. 300 is probably ultimately a better movie but the two aren’t nearly as far apart as I’d originally figured.

Score: 76