She Slouches to Conquer

Eva Green burns it down in 300: Rise of an Empire.

«½ 300: Rise of an Empire. Written by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller. Directed by Noam Murro. At area theaters.

          

History is much like a golf swing: it's harder to unlearn bad habits than it is to learn it right in the first place. So take pity, if you will, on the hapless adjunct professor of history, facing a class full of students whose only knowledge of antiquity is watching Noam Murro's wretched 300: Rise of an Empire. Unlike most scholarly issues treated by specialists, the epic clash between Greeks and Persians is one story everybody thinks they know something about. And yet, after watching this 300, the class would start out knowing less than nothing.

          And so…no, Jacob, the Persian King Xerxes did not attack Greece in 480 BC because he was "annoyed by the notion of Greek freedom." (He invaded to punish the Greeks for meddling in the empire's internal politics.) And no, Madison, Greek hoplites did not fight like Roman gladiators, flailing and hacking as individual "heroes". (They fought as tightly-knit phalanxes, with shields locked together.) And no, Tyler, the Spartans didn't swoop down at the last minute to save the Athenian fleet at the Battle of Salamis (Sparta sent a token few ships, but the Spartans had virtually no tradition of fighting at sea.) In fact, Lucas, the real "tyranny" in this story wasn't Persia—which had a fairly liberal organization that allowed individual states much freedom to run their own affairs. The tyranny was Sparta itself, a totalitarian state unique in Greece for its secret police and nasty habit of enslaving other Greeks. Nor was democratic Athens more than partially "free", in the sense that it was slave-owning society where only adult males governed in principle, and only wealthy adult males in practice.

          But let's back up. 300: Rise of an Empire follows in the style of 300, Zack Snyder's 2007 hit based on the Frank Miller graphic novel. I've had occasion to complain about that film's butchery of Herodotus' already "colorful" history elsewhere. Rise isn't so much of a sequel as a pendant piece, covering events that happened while Snyder's Spartans under King Gerard Butler held the line at Thermopylae. The out-numbered Athenian fleet, under the crafty Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) prevented a massive enemy navy from doing a wet end-around the Spartans. Along with their knowledge of the terrain, the Athenians had to rely on their superior seamanship to frustrate the enemy. And indeed, there is a great story to be told of the sea battle off Artemisium—one too long in the shadow of Leonidas' legendary stand at Thermopylae.

          Murro's movie is far, far from the definitive telling. Even more than 300, Rise is preoccupied with conjuring turgid, busied-up visual spectacle that ups the ante on beheadings and lopped-off limbs. (And no, Ethan, the Greeks didn't lop off many limbs; in hoplite warfare the damage was usually puncture wounds.) The Persian soldiers pop nicely, like sacks full of stage-blood, and the Greek oared warships seem to motor as if pushed around by 300-hp outboards, and the whole point seems to achieve, as Themistocles says of the Spartans, "a beautiful death." It's all somehow pornographic, but in the sense of being repetitive and dull, not titillating.

          The eroticizing of combat is nothing new. Nor should historical accuracy ever be an object in itself when fiction is made out of history. The point should be to strike the larger themes, not dwell on niggling details. Trouble is, the larger themes here have nothing to do with the tragic values realized so brilliantly in the works of actual Greeks. Screenwriters Snyder and Johnstad take a perfunctory stab at grown-up tragedy by suggesting that Themistocles invited invasion by killing Xerxes' father, Darius, at the Battle of Marathon. In other words, Themistocles sinned by needlessly gilding his victory, Alas, the lesson becomes, in these writers' minds, that he should have killed the young Xerxes too, before the son could take revenge. Here, hubris is an even more foreign concept than accuracy.

          There is an inviting ambiguity of sorts in the title, Rise of an Empire. Which empire, actually? Persia's, or the one Athens built after the war, largely through Putin-esque bullying and forced "contributions" to a "self-defense" league run entirely by Athenians? Ironies abound in what, you know, actually happened. But instead, Snyder and Murro are content to deliver tired, mostly discarded themes about the triumph of the "free" West over decadent, slavish Orientals. The kind of stuff that was already old at the turn of the 20^th century, let alone the 21^st. Mussolini would have loved it.

          If there's anything to appreciate here, it's Eva Green (Casino Royale) as Artemisia, the dominatrix-admiral of the Persian fleet. What's not to like as she struts the deck in leather corset, fishnet stockings and gonzo eye-makeup, breathing lines like "You fight better than you fuck, Themistocles!" and "I know every man under my lash"? When seated on her throne, she insouciantly drapes a leg over the arm—all the better to display the source of her power. She's more like an animated villain than most animated villains.

          In her breakneck, WTF performance, Green cops the only attitude this material truly deserves: contempt.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro