300: Rise of a Disappointment

(image source: http://www.wallpaperswala.com/the-300-rise-of-an-empire/)

I was overly excited to go see 300: Rise of an Empire, I mean, the first one was an awesome movie, beautifully directed by Zack Snyder. The storyline was compelling and the graphics just blew your mind away. This was my mindset walking in to the theatre last Saturday night. 

The movie starts with King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) slaughtered on the battlefield beside his 300 Spartans – right now my mind is going “ok, so we start exactly where we left off. Good!” and then the narrative starts and you get completely lost. This thing is going left and right, up and down and you get completely lost in the timeline. I actually found myself thinking countless times “so, when are we exactly?”

This happens because the film is set as a prequel/ side-sequel/ sequel to the original title and that would be perfectly okay if the over narration would bother to explain this to the audience.

This story has nothing to do with 300 or the Spartans for most of it. It revolves around a Greek general named Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) and a Persian commander named Artemisia (Eva Green). They try to fit all the events around the Persian invasion of Greece, but fail miserably at it. They keep some of the same characters like the God-king (Rodrigo Santoro) and Leonidas’ wife, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey). But trust me, it is basically about that one Greek and that one Persian who is actually Greek but is pissed-off at them so she turns Persian and decides to off the entire Greek nation. – If you feel a little bit lost at this time, it is entirely normal, that’s how the movie works and how we all feel.

At this point we’re seeing a movie that, despite some of the same characters and similarities, has nothing to do with the previous one.

But the movie goes on and so do we, trying to make sense of everything that is happening.

Now we’ve seen some semi-epic battle scenes and they, totally out of the bloom, cram a sex scene in there. This happens after a very big battle and, when everyone is resting, Artemisia sends a small ship to get Themistokles in an attempt to “negotiate”. He gets in the boat and goes to meet her. We’re mid negotiations and they start going at it to a point where the guards outside her chambers start listening and have no idea what to do. This lasts for a good five minutes with no explanation what so ever, then they stop and the general goes back to his camp as if nothing had happened.

First I was confused but now I’m pissed – and a little bit relieved I didn’t spend $20 to see it in IMAX– as if the movie wasn’t bad enough so far, it just starts going downhill from this point.

We have arrived at the final 20 minutes of the movie and only now they decide to tie-up the two storylines and give a half-baked explanation of when exactly this is taking place. I say “too little too late!”

My final recommendation is do not see it. Don’t waste your money watching this because I can guarantee you will leave that theatre disappointed. There are some good graphics and enough blood to make Tarantino proud, but the storyline is extremely confusing and the director has an obsession with specs of dust floating in the air – every indoor scene has slow motion specs of dust just floating around and every outside scene has slow motion ashes or drops of water just floating around. As you can probably tell by now, there is a LOT of slow motion in this movie.

And don’t even feel bad for not seeing it because, unfortunately a lot a people still saw it opening weekend (which might mean there is another one of these coming in the not so distant future) and they have already profited more then their production budget. The movie cost $110 million and already made over $132 million ($45 million domestic and $87 million foreign).