300 franchise Rise of the Empire return features darker blood
YES, it might have taken seven years, but the 300 franchise has returned with more hysterically historical butchery for your entertainment.
Leigh Paatsch
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Director: Noam Murro (Smart People)
Starring: Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Callan Mulvey, Rodrigo Santoro
Seeing is bleeding
Duck and cover, all you Ancient Greeks!
Them peeved Persians are back, and they’re lookin’ to kick some serious Athens.
Yep, it might have taken seven years, but the 300 franchise has returned with more hysterically historical butchery for your entertainment pleasure.
There will be burly men. There will be biceps. There will be barrels of baby oil applied to those biceps. And, sorry, no prizes for guessing: there will be blood.
The original 300 made its reputation on drenching its restaging of the legendary Battle of Thermopylae in a billion litres of the red stuff.
The shooting style that captured the carnage was strangely transfixing.
Whenever someone felt the need to bleed, the world would go into a suspended state of slo-mo so the camera could glide towards the open wound.
Then came the money shot: a liquefied ribbon of red blood cells hanging prettily in midair for a few seconds, before dropping to stain the ground below.
Needless to say, 300: Rise of an Empiredoesn’t go messing with that winning formula. Only point of difference this time around is that the precious bodily fluids appear darker, thicker and more viscous than before. Kind of like plum jam mixed with molten wax.
All that splattering goo looks awesomely appalling in 3D, which must delight the filmmakers no end.
Don’t worry if you blink and miss some of it along the way. There are more sudden deaths in this movie than lines of dialogue: a never-ending procession of he-men just waiting to have their throats slit, chests pierced, backs slashed and (in what becomes a recurring motif) heads split in two.
Deep inside this wanton splatter-fest, you can just about make out a story going on.
Much of it takes place across the same three days originally covered in 300. However, while Leonidas and his ill-fated band of Spartans are fighting to the death on dry land, some other fighters aligned to the wider Greek cause are mounting a last-ditch defence on the high seas.
Their leader is Themistokles (Australian actor Sullivan Stapleton), a dour Athenian general famed for his strategic nous.
He is also quite adept at delivering rousing pre-battle speeches while the soundtrack turns the beating drums and wailing choirs up to 11.
The Greek ships under our hero’s command clash on a regular basis with a far superior Persian fleet. The enemy navy is run by Artemisia (Eva Green), an old-school warrior princess who has the wardrobe of a dominatrix and the personality of a serial killer.
Remarkably, during a brief cease fire, Artemisia and Themistokles seize the opportunity to meet, disrobe and then rearrange the furniture as only naked people can.
Obviously, the Ancient Greeks had a different understanding of what constituted the rules of engagement.
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