300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE

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Bloody Sandals
“300” Sequel Only Works When Eva Green is Onscreen

“300: Rise of an Empire,” of the sword-and-sandal hybrid war franchise based on Frank Miller’s (“Sin City”) graphic novel, fumbles through this superfluous sequel to “300” (2006).

Huge sheets of splaying dark red blood splatters across the screen during gory battle sequences between half-naked, heavily muscled soldiers wielding swords to decapitate and slice open their generic rivals. The video-game-inspired 3D effects come off as a novel graphic display the first couple of times you see them. But by the third, fourth, and fifth go-rounds, boredom sets in.

Zach Snyder (the screenwriter of both “300” movies) abdicates his directing duties from the franchise's first installment to relative newcomer Noam Murro — known primarily for his instantly forgettable 2008 romantic comedy “Smart People.”

Yet from its drab saturated visual design you would hardly notice that a different filmmaker is calling the shots. Likely an attempt to mask the film’s extensive use of computer-generated imagery, the dull color palate on display has a sleep-inducing effect. It numbs the audience.

The year is 480 B.C. — the same period covered in the first film. Whereas “300” dealt with the Persian attack on Sparta, the war is now viewed from Greece’s seaside city of Athens, where the Persian warlord Xerxes’s enormous armada of ships threaten to take over.

It’s revealed that Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) loosed the arrow that finished off the Persian King Darius during battle. Flashback sequences expose the war goddess Artemisia’s troubled history of brutal abuse at the hands of her fellow Greeks, which turned her into a fierce enemy of her own people. She is widely feared for “selling her soul to death himself.”

Artemisia now leads Xerxes’s 1000-ship fleet. Significant too in this revved up cartoonish version of ancient history is the bizarre method that Xerxes (played by a returning Rodrigo Santoro) uses to transmute himself from a mere mortal to a golden-skinned god adorned with a plethora of gold chains and necklaces.

For all of its brief stabs at putting the story into an historic context, “300: Rise of an Empire” is too visually and aurally cluttered for much if any of the exposition to stick.

What we do know is that Eva Green’s Artemisia is the baddest warrior of them all. With Green’s goth-girl make-up and dangerously spiked-back corset firmly in place, the bedroom-eyed French actress chews more scenery standing still than any of film’s big-spectacle battle scenes combined. When Artemisia kisses the lips of a man immediately after severing his head from his body, she precedes Salome’s femme fatale by 500 years. Emotionally, Artemisia is a well-oiled machine. The film earns its R-rating during a rough-sex scene in which Artemisia seduces Themistocles to entice him to join with the Persians. She not only takes the wind out of her lover’s sails, but also hijacks the story as its most intelligent, ruthless, and lusty participant.

Culminating with the battle of Thermopylae — in which Xerxes’ ships funnel into a fog-shrouded Greek trap in the Gulf of Malia on the eastern Aegean Sea — the movie compresses into a static episode. There is no pleasure to be taken from Themistocles’s winning strategy because Sullivan Stapleton’s portrayal is so painfully flat. Instead we wait patiently for Artemisia to return to the screen for her final curtain call.

Eva Green so outclasses the brittle source material and plodding storytelling beneath her that rather than elevate the film, she abandons it. If only Frank Miller had written a graphic novel entitled “Artemisia” instead of “Xerxes.” Heaven knows this film only works when Eva Green is on screen.

Rated R. 103 mins. 

IMMORTALS

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Mickey Rourke vs. Gods & Humans
No Family Jewels are Safe
By Cole Smithey

Pitched to the public for its producer's association to the 2008 cartoon-cutout sword and sandal trash fest "300," this spectacle-driven tale of myth-based fantasy rightly earns its stripes thanks to a heavy-duty cast that includes the masterful John Hurt as a human-disguised Zeus and Mickey Rourke as an incredibly vicious King Hyperion.

Said producers have taken note of the many criticisms levied against “300” and made significant changes in response. Tarsem Singh ("The Cell") is a welcome replacement to hit-and-miss director Zach Snyder (hit with "Watchmen" and miss with "Sucker Punch"). Gone is the fetishistic adoration of the exposed male physique, which sent “300” into the realm of camp, in favor of truly breathtaking scenes of spectacle in the context of a story that actually holds together.

Neptune splashes down to Earth, setting off an unforgettable tsunami which crashes against a cliff shoreline with gigantic, mind-boggling ferocity. It’s one of the first times in recent memory that such a scene excited me so much as an audience member that I was momentarily shaken out of my “critic” mindset.

Greek peasant warrior Theseus (Henry Cavill – “The Tudors”) is handpicked by the mortal incarnation of Zeus (John Hurt) to take up arms against King Hyperion (Rourke) who, with the help of his enormous army, is wiping out everything in his path in search of an all-empowering golden bow (forged in the heavens by the god Ares) that will destroy humanity. Theseus has a running start at battling King Hyperion considering he’s been mentored by Zeus. Still, Rourke’s ruthlessly sadistic King Hyperion is like a cross between British Petroleum, Bernie Madoff, Alan Greenspan, and Dick Cheney.

Only the long-lost magical Epirus Bow can release an army of gargantuan Titans imprisoned in a giant cubical cell buried in Mount Tartaros, where they wait to be brought back to life so they can take revenge against the gods who put them there. The catch is that the Gods of Olympus who defeated the Titans are sworn not to interfere with human matters even if it means allowing King Hyperion to obtain the powerful bow. As such, Henry Cavill’s Theseus carries the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Lush compositions of magnificent iconic imagery are captured by cinematographer Brendan Galvin (“Veronica Guerin”). Ominous foreboding skies cover every scene like something out of a painting by Bruegel the Elder. There’s a constant sense of mythic themes running at crosscurrents to the brutality onscreen. Some of this effect can be attributed to John Hurt’s uncanny ability to influence the narrative during his short but crucial scenes that bookend the story.

The incredibly violent action that occurs includes numerous decapitations and scenes of erotic sensuality that temporarily alleviate the bone-crushing violence on hand. Myth genre movies have come a long way since the Ray Harryhausen- designed stop motion effects of “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963). “Immortals” is a big-screen popcorn movie to send off 2011 with a bang. You can taste the fury.

Rated R. 110 mins.

ALEXANDER

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Swords, Sandals & Eyeliner

Oliver Stone Loses Alexander's Story
By Cole Smithey

You know from an early scene of tiresome exposition by Anthony Hopkins that Oliver Stone's three-hour sword-and-sandal epic is doomed. You see a giant scar across the right side Hopkins's forehead mysteriously move to the left side between shots.

Then comes Colin Farrell's Irish accent that wrestles against Angelina Jolie's faux Russian intonation like a cat and a monkey fighting in a burlap bag. For all its attention to detail in two reasonably good battle scenes, Stone's movie fails to tell the complex story of one of the most enigmatic conquerors in history.

But more than that, Stone doesn't present characters that the audience can believe in as representative of their historic roles.

There's an undue controversy surrounding Oliver Stone's pre-Christian depiction of Alexander as a bi-sexual lover that may give the movie mileage with gay audiences who are likely to be disappointed at the soft-peddled relationship between Alexander (Farrell) and his lifelong friend Hephaistion (Jared Leto).

Apart from both characters wearing matching eyeliner throughout the movie, and sharing hushed conversations and hugs, there isn't enough subtext to hang a horseshoe on. Hephaistion is Alexander's effeminate battle commander whose masochistic existence revolves around being mistreated. We hear Hephaistion and Alexander profess their love for one another, but never see the price of their relationship because they never challenge one another. To his credit Jared Leto gives the most convincing performance in the film as Alexander's wide-eyed paramour.

"Alexander" opens with a clumsy homage to Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane wherein Alexander's dying hand drops a ring onto the floor in 323 B.C. The clunky backward-gazing narrative device is sunk deeper by a segue to 40-years later when Alexander's elderly military general Ptolemy (Anthony Hopkins) dictates his version of Alexander's life to a Greek scholar who busily fills endless scrolls in a palatial library.

Angelina Jolie enjoys some early scene-chewing with live snakes (she's seldom shown during the movie without them) as Alexander's domineering mother Olympias. Alexander's battle-scarred father King Philip (Val Kilmer)  appears in her bedroom and attempts to violently extract sexual satisfaction even as young Alexander watches from the same bed.

Our crash course in Alexander's childhood shifts from oedipal mother worship to homosexual and racist teachings by Aristotle (Christopher Plummer). Alexander covets his father's throne. Connor Paolo gives a confident performance as the young Alexander. He shares a remarkable likeness to Collin Farrell that temporarily tips the scales toward some suspension of disbelief.

Although Alexander The Great won more than 70 battles during the 12-years of his reign, Stone dramatizes just two engagements that are meant to signify how Alexander and his armies conquered millions of square miles of foreign territory. The first conflict at Gaugamela is a 12-minute war sequence that attempts to exhibit the cleverness of Alexander's military strategy while giving the viewer a taste of the brutality involved. However, the painstaking sequence lacks an adequate narrative structure to properly acquaint the audience with its characters.

The film's payoff finale battle involves Alexander's horse-led army
attacking India's Elephant bound troops in the thick of an India forest. Oliver Stone shifts to an odd red-tinged film treatment that gives an hallucinatory quality and foreshadows Alexander's imminent death. The psychedelic color scheme embellishes the battle's cruel violence in a way that makes it seem more disturbing in its abstraction. When one of Alexander's soldiers slices off the trunk of a giant elephant, you feel a kind of empathy for the animal that goes beyond any sensitivity you experience for the soldiers who compulsively fight for the sake of fighting.

A heavy-handed musical score by Vangelis ("Blade Runner") hobbles "Alexander" with bombastic surges of sonic information that further removes the audience from the movie. There isn't a single scene in the film that is improved by the Vangelis's music.

The old commander Ptolemy pedantically says of Alexander, "No tyrant ever gave back so much." It's a troubling notion for a leftist filmmaker like to Oliver Stone to endorse. As Ptolemy preaches on and on during the movie about Alexander's place in history, I wonder at Oliver Stone's little-seen documentary about Fidel Castro for which he interviewed the Cuban dictator.

"Alexander" comes at a time when America is poised as a fear-ridden empire overreaching its boundaries while neglecting its strained domestic issues. To regard Alexander as a man who achieved amazing military success is not necessarily to view him as a hero. Perhaps Alexander's bi-sexuality is an escape clause that Oliver Stone planted in the film to distance right-wing audiences from associating too freely with the warrior. Either way, the truth is never what it's cracked up to be. It's too bad that American cinema hasn't improved on the sword-and-sandal epic in the past 40-years. At this point it's a bankrupt genre.

Rated R. 156 mins.