300: Rise of an Empire: The Half-Truths and Bloody Fog of Cartoon War

The moment you point out the howling historical inaccuracies and possibly harmful over-the-top fantasy violence in a piece of super-stylized hard-core war porn like 300: Rise of an Empire (or in its equally offensive predecessor 300), some pundit or punter with one hand in a bucket of bloody popcorn is going to whine, “You don’t go see a 300 movie expecting subtlety, intelligence, restraint, or historical accuracy!” Which is like saying you don’t eat bacon-onion-ring-cheeseburgers expecting a healthy life free of coronary issues.

The problem is that a steady diet of either poison—popular junk-foods full of heart-stopping grease, fat, cheese, sodium and red meat; or popular junk-food movies like Rise of an Empire that slate only our basest, most blood-thirsty instincts—will slowly, eventually, insidiously kill you—either your body or your soul.

There’s an unspoken code among many film critics (let’s say, primarily under 50 and publishing on the Internet) to not be a moral scold about movies. Some of us grew up in the ‘80s, the era of Tipper Gore and the PMRC, roll our eyes at the “demons are everywhere!” anti-pop-culture ravings of the Pat Robertsons of the world, and are still treated to Bill O’Reilly’s attention-desperate pulpit pounding about the evils of rap music. Most of us critics want to grow up to be Roger (Ebert) not Rex (Reed). So the general rule is to review the film, not the film’s ideas.

Zack Snyder’s original 300, based on Frank “the Fascist” Miller’s graphic novel, visually bulldozed its way into almost seeming like a great “movie”: It was (too) easy to get so caught up in the stark and striking (and often shocking) imagery that you ignored the repellant, racist, pile of laughable crap that passed for the film’s “message.”

That, of course, is what makes 300—which remains a powerful visual “treat”—so utterly repugnant: It uses the cloak of “historical legend” plus wowsa chiaroscuro CGI battlefield tableaus and male musculature (including a sexily vicious Michael Fassbender in a loin cloth—and he’s the least of 300’s homoerotic manqués) to not just sell but fully fetishize The Glory of War (against barbaric, mystical, almost inhuman Persian [Iranian] hordes) to testosterone-jacked young men in Ed Hardy T-shirts. It’s fascist, pro-war propaganda packaged as delightfully over-the-top, fist-pumping Cineplex entertainment.

To no one’s surprise, 300’s sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire, is more of the same. Except now, with Snyder serving only as writer and producer and without the admittedly gripping and narratively compact legend of the fall of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, the film itself feels more of a creatively unfocused mess.

(And yes, it’s a “sequel.” The nit-picking hand-wringers will point out that the historical events in Rise of an Empire takes place concurrently to those in 300, not after, so really it’s neither “sequel” nor “prequel,” but more of an “equal,” but really, who cares? It’s a big, dumb movie made solely to cash in on the success of its predecessor. It’s born of no greater artistic ambition than the bilking of lemmings for the sake of greed. It’s a sequel.)

In Rise of an Empire, new director Noam Murro does a laudable job of gracelessly mimicking Snyder’s on-screen aesthetic with enthusiastic mediocrity as he and screenwriters Snyder and Kurt Johnstad try to tell the story of how at the 480 BC Battle of Salamis the Athenian navy, led by the heroically muscled Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton, once terrific in Australia’s Animal Kingdom) fought back, through tactics and trickery, the much larger invading Persian navy, led by villainous Goth Fatale Artemisia (Eva Green) on behalf of giant, bald, guyliner-ed Persian god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro).

So there are land battles and sea battles and land battles that end up in the sea and sea battles that make their way to land; and there are solemn voice-overs about “freedom” and “democracy” and whatnot, and the obligatory “battle rally” speeches (pale and spindly bastard descendants of Agincourt and Braveheart). But most of all there’s blood, sweat, and CGI pecs, abs, and cleavage as heads and limbs go flying and crimson gore gushes forth in epic zero-G fountains.

Supa-R-rated, slo-mo, 3D hyper-violence aside, all of the above historical names and events are true: Themistocles and Artemisia were real, as was the Battle of Salamis. Of course, names and the broad, main events are about the only thing “true” or “real” about Rise of an Empire.

Once it loosely markets itself as “historical action” and plops down it’s “real events” bonafides, the film is free to run rampant with all manner of ridiculous make-em-ups. No, Persia’s King Darius wasn’t mortally wounded at Marathon, or even present at the battle. No, his son Xerxes didn’t enter a giant, boiling pool of mystical Nair and self-tanner in order to emerge a bald, golden god-king.

And while Artemisia was a Greek-born Persian naval commander, she wasn’t some wild-eyed witchy king-maker with a jones for decapitation who defected to Persia after being brutally raped as a child. Nor did she use her magic 3D décolletage to seduce Themistocles into a diplomatic parlay turned epic hate boinking.

(In fact, the real Themistocles, Athenian statesman and victor at Salamis, and the film’s gloriously taut-muscled hero, himself defected to Persia years later. Oops. We can assume that tidbit won’t be in the inevitable three-quel.)

Oh, and no, the day was not saved at Salamis by the deux-ex-cliché arrival of the Spartan navy (?!?), led by Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) who leaps brilliantly into battle sans armor. Given that the Spartans, better known for their land warriors than sailing skills, only contributed 16 ships to the Greek effort, the film could have just as accurately ended with Warrior Space Unicorns saving the day by sliding down Battle Rainbows.

Which brings us back to the initial defense of such mendacity in the name of a “good story”: “Who cares? It’s just a really violent sword and sandals flick. I go to be entertained for a couple hours, not learn history.”

The problem is that, as with Leonidas and the 300 at Thermopylae, anyone who finds their loins well and truly girded, not to mention painfully over stimulated by all the righteous (if slightly less aesthetically deft) on-screen limb-hacking in the name of A Good Cause (“freedom,” “democracy,” “a united Greece,” “general hatred and distrust of other cultures, especially brutal weirdo Eastern foreigners”) can, on some emotional, subconscious level, justify his or her blood boner: “Well, it’s history. It really happened. Therefore, it’s all true. And it’s good to know—knowledge is a virtue. And this deep, barely-understood desire I now have to cut a Persian in half with a sword is… justified and right.”

300 and 300: Rise of an Empire not only give war and killing a visually rich hand job, they also give us superhuman heroes of slaughter passing as “normal” human warriors, set against stunning battlefield vistas. Human warriors who carry out impossible physical feats of bloody warfare. Whose horses leap a dozen feet out of deep water onto the decks of ships. Who strike bold, near-erotic poses on the battlefield between dispatching of their near-inhuman adversaries (who often wear monstrous helmet-masks or appear as grotesques and ghouls).

These are fantasy films about fantasy heroes and villains who have deeply personal—and wholly invented—backstories and vengeful motivations, as required by Hollywood Scriptwriting. This is as much fantasy myth-making and storytelling as Lord of the Rings and Clash of the Titans, and that might be okay (if the films were better), except for that crass veneer of “historical truth” slopped over these 300 films. No one watches the escapist superheroes of The Avengers and thinks, on any level, that they and their actions have much bearing on real life.

But by making up both motivations and near-magical abilities for their “real life” protagonists and antagonists, the 300 filmmakers veer into the realm of propaganda where supposedly “historical” war stories and legends serve a sole purpose: to use fantasies about the glory (and, yes, joy) of brutal warfare to indoctrinate later generations of impressionable, emotional youth so they’ll at least support, if not actually fight future wars.

(I guarantee, as silly as these films may seem to some of us, there are many others who come away completely pumped up by them, believing in them, repeating their blood-soaked credos and poster slogans as they pound Bud Light on the way to the shooting range.)

By blurring half-historical “facts” with utter fantasy fictions, by setting them against brilliantly artsy fantasy vistas based on “real places,” these films push the message that killing is fun as long as you have a good, glorious, righteous reason for it. (And don’t worry, someone will always provide a good, glorious, righteous reason for it.) Take away the cartoonish stylization, and it’s not that far a trip from movies like 300 and Rise of an Empire to modern-day paeans to SEAL Team warriors in rah-rah films like Lone Survivor and Act of Valor.

No one is accusing Snyder, Murro, or Johnstad of deliberately creating militaristic propaganda—I honestly don’t think they give that much thought to what the images they produce actually mean. (Frank Miller I’m not so sure about…) Just like their audiences, they dismiss their movies as fun, harmless entertainment.

We critics often want to play along with that delusion—review the film, not its ideas; avoid speculation on the cultural impact or effect on viewers for fear of seeming like cranky, judgmental scolds. After all, we have degrees in film, not psychology. But the entire point of both art and entertainment is to have an effect on the viewer. When we praise the art (or dismantle it with vicious snark) without thinking about who likes it and why, we conveniently dismiss the very power that drew us to an art form in the first place.

300: Rise of an Empire is a mediocre, unimportant movie—one that many people won’t ever bother to see and will likely forget existed until a few months from now when a momentary craving for ludicrous, brainless cartoon violence overrules the better angels of their cable or video tastes. And if that happens, they might get a kick out of it, especially the truly epic sea-battle vistas.

But just like all those bacon-onion-ring cheeseburgers, we need to keep an eye on what we pump into our brains in our pursuit for cheap thrills. No one wants to ban anything—but just be aware of the long-term price we and our culture might pay if we make a habit of consuming it.