(Because, y’know, this time it’s personal.) At his side is his formidable admiral Artemisia (Eva Green), a bloodthirsty Greek woman who turned her back on her people after the rape and murder of her family. Narrated in overly portentous tones by 300‘s Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey, slumming it between seasons of Game of Thrones), Rise opens with a quickie rundown of the Battle of Marathon, during which Greek general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) kills the emperor of the Persian Empire, Darius, and sets off a chain of events that leads to a young Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) declaring himself a god-king and embarking on a second invasion of the fledgling Greek democracy.
Rise of an Empire (also based on a graphic novel by Miller), slavishly adheres to Snyder’s 300 without bringing anything new to the bloodbath, or even adequately imitating it. Believe it or not, the pseudo-sequel 300: Rise of an Empire manages to one-up its predecessor, in the sense that it’s even more gratuitous, over-the-top, and fetishistic than Zack Snyder’s stylistic adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the 300 Spartan warriors who held an invading Persian army of thousands at bay at the Battle of Thermopylae.