Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) hurls the fateful spear that deals King Darius a mortal blow. The outnumbered Greeks engage the weary Persians before they have even managed to row their boats ashore, while the valiant Gen. (Both “300” films have made effective use of a slightly formal, literary voiceover to evoke the oral tradition of Greek epic poetry.) Fittingly regal and stern, Gorgo recounts the first clash of these two great armies, a decade earlier at the town of Marathon, which plays out in flashback as the first of the movie’s extravagant battle scenes.
She’s a ferocious presence, but well matched by Sparta’s own Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey, reprising her “300” role), who has less screen time but also serves as the movie’s narrator, holding forth on the long and bloody backstory of the Greco-Persian wars as she guides a warship toward a looming battle. And while Xerxes battles things out with the good King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, seen in recycled footage from the first film) on land, it is Artemisia who leads Persia’s charge against Greece by sea. Spared but sold into slavery, she was rescued by the Persian King Darius (Igal Naor), father of Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who raised her as a kind of surrogate daughter and stoked her warrior ethos. As a young girl, we learn, the Greek-born Artemisia watched helplessly as her entire village (including her parents) was slaughtered by other invading Greeks, earning her a healthy distrust of her own people. If “300” was largely a boys-only affair, “Rise of an Empire” very much belongs to the women - specifically one woman named Artemisia (Green), who sports a warrior’s stoic countenance and the blazing azure stare of a femme very fatale.
Arriving in theaters on the box office fumes of “The Legend of Hercules” and “Pompeii,” it should prove to be the ancient epic auds have been waiting for.
Anchored by Eva Green’s fearsome performance as a Persian naval commander whose vengeful bloodlust makes glowering King Xerxes seem a mere poseur, this highly entertaining time-filler lacks the mythic resonances that made “300” feel like an instant classic, but works surprisingly well on its own terms. But Snyder and co-writer Kurt Johnstad handily surmount that problem in “300: Rise of an Empire,” which offers a “meanwhile, back in Athens” story to complement the Spartan narrative of the first film, along with an even higher quotient of impaled torsos, severed limbs and rippling Mediterranean musculature. Few recent tentpoles have lent themselves less naturally to a sequel than Zack Snyder’s “300,” a movie in which nearly all the major characters died, while a brief coda showed a unified Greek army about to lay waste to the remnants of Persia.
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