Green sometimes suggests cruel hauteur more often than she puts it across. Green), impossibly willowy and virtually dripping black, like an Aubrey Beardsley drawing.Ī Greek who suffered horrifically at the hands of warring countrymen, she’s revealed as the éminence grise behind Xerxes (swaggeringly reprised by Rodrigo Santoro), though Ms. But the bigger mortal threat to manliness lies in the Persians’ vicious naval commander, Artemisia (Ms.
The hacking and impalement of ancient combat still yield gore that defies gravity and invites our delectation in the obligatory money-shot slow-motion.
Unlike the death-cult Spartans, led to war in the earlier film by Gerard Butler in a performance that unleashed a thousand meme variations, this motley crew of slightly less chiseled Greeks follows the less inspiring, or, at any rate, less shouty, Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton of “Gangster Squad” and the TV show “Strike Back”). Free city-states are mustering a defense against the Persian invaders and their myriad ships, under ever-darkening prospects (and skies). Greece - or its tightly rendered, color-constrained graphic equivalent - is again in danger, but the battles in this contemporary sequel center on the sea. Classical historians disagree, but it was probably Herodotus who first posed a question that would ring out across the ages, unanswered till now: Wouldn’t Eva Green look awesome kissing the severed head of an insolent captive? “300: Rise of an Empire” puts the issue to rest (the answer: yes, but it’ll never last) and strives to uphold the rah-rah style of visuals and rhetoric established by its popular predecessor, “300.”