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    300: Rise of an Empire

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

    WARNING: This review is hidden because it reveals the content of the film.
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    The best thing about “300” was the combat and the visual style. While being a thoroughly enjoyable film because of its attitude towards war and its wanton violence, the story was very simple and the characters were not very well developed. In this next chapter, the stylistic choices have been pulled back, but instead we get deeper, more complex characters without sacrificing the action or violence. Many of the characters return (all but the ones that ended up dead), some new ones get introduced and you will recognize the ample bloodshed and use of slo-motion to accentuate the combat. There are just as many scenes of Persian and Greek soldiers slaughtering each other and getting dismembered, skewered, and brutally killed as the previous film so that’s something to cheer about for fans of the previous movie. This story is fairly well self-contained however and in my opinion there really isn’t a correct order to watch the two films we’ve gotten up to now so even if you have not seen “300”, you don’t necessarily need to in order to enjoy this film. While the characters are what I found the most compelling in the film, the battle sequences are quite spectacular. What we have here is a naval war, but not the kind that we’re used to seeing. Most films featuring ships battling each other include mostly long-ranged weapons, such as canons but here, the ships are mostly platforms used for ramming and bringing soldiers to their opponents. There are scenes where so many warships are crashing together and floating next to each other that the sea becomes a solid battlefield, with soldiers running from one ship to another, jumping over what seem more like small crevices in the earth than the endless sea in order to sink their blades into enemy flesh. In that way, there is a very nice variety in the combat. We’ve got an army of Greeks that are desperately outnumbered and must use ingenuity, trickery and strategy to combat an opponent, but for all of the planning it often ends up in a large brawl with swordplay, characters blocking blows with their shields and soldiers getting a sword to the gut before being pushed into the sea to drown or bleed out. Like the previous film, it plays fast and loose with some historical aspects by introducing some pretty impressive super weapons for the Persians and having some characters present at battles where they weren’t in real life but hey, it’s a movie. If I wanted real-life history, I’d attend a lecture at the university. If you did have problems with the demonization of the Persian people in the first film, there is significantly less of that here. Far less freakish and deformed soldiers are present in this film. It’s more of an epic battle than an exercise in style and violence. Alright so up to now, you’ve heard some good stuff about this movie, the great sequences of combat, the ample blood and violence, the differences and the similarities between this one and the other film, but now let me talk to you about the real standouts: the main characters. We’ve got a terrific villain in the form of Artemisia and a protagonist that is her equal in Themistocles. We’ve got our Greek Hero, a general who took a chance ten years ago and saw it pay off. This is the guy that’s so bad-ass that when he and his soldiers are battling the Persians in the rain and he loses his sword, he grabs his helmet and slams it into the face of his opponents. He’s not just a brawler though; as the film develops you really get to see him use clever tactics to even the odds against an opponent that outnumbers him greatly. He’s not the pompous, arrogant king that Leonidas was; he’s a much simpler man that actually regrets inadvertently starting this war by killing Darius. To him, the defense of Greece is his only purpose and he hopes to turn this threat into a victory, a way to unite all of the Greek city-states into a force that no opponent would ever dare bring war to again. Sullivan Stapleton might not have the on-screen presence that Gerard Butler did, but he is a very compelling actor. The real standout here is Eva Green however. Her character is a former Greek that now works for the Persians as the top naval commander. She’s ruthless and easily provoked, but a skilled general. There are some nice subtle nuances in the character of Artemisia and despite the fact that she is out for blood and looking to annihilate Greece, our heroes, you will find yourself cheering for her because she has a few moments of vulnerability. She’s not just a pretty face planning her strategy and sending other to die on the battlefield, she is a competent combatant and we get two scenes between her and Themistocles that are the highlights of the film. Both of them are combat sequences, but one is more of a mental battle with some eroticism thrown in, while the other is a more traditional scene of sword-to-sword combat. There are some really interesting moments between the two of them that are a lot of fun to analyze and even between her and her master Xerxes there are some really fascinating things to theorize and talk about once the movie is over. I’m looking forward to the director’s commentary on every scene between her and a main or secondary character to see what was going on in the director’s mind and on the. We even get a bit more expansion on some of the surviving characters from the first movie, including more backstory on Xerxes and some follow-up on Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) and Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan, buried under makeup and slightly more grotesque than before thanks to a nasty set of chompers) I’m focusing a lot more on the positives here because overall I think if you want to like this film, you really will. I didn’t particularly care for the inclusion of some f-bombs and felt there was a bit of something missing here that was undoubtedly there in “300”. Maybe it’s the lack of really iconic lines or the fact that this film isn’t nearly as over-the-top as the previous one or that here, it really doesn’t feel nearly as much as an underdog story, but the good points far outnumber the bad. The ultra-violence is satisfying, the production is first-rate, the 3-D is pretty good, the costumes and special effects are convincing and I actually think that the characters here are very interesting. You always hope when a sequel comes out that it won’t be just more of the same and that it will develop the world that you’ve come to love further and in this case, it really does. Check out “300: Rise of an Empire” this is not just a cheap cash-grab ridding on the heels of a cult-favorite, it’s a story that was worth telling and worth seeing. (3-D Theatrical version on the big screen, March 9, 2014)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  14.3.2014 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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