As a narrative the film is a non-starter, as it spends so much time looking back and nodding to the original that the story feels a little stop/start. He’s meant to deliver a Snyder-esque film, and so he transfers the aesthetics of 300 to a more water-based setting and offers similar speed-ramped thrills. Watching the film I’d be hard pressed to suggest that director Noam Murro has a distinctive voice as a filmmaker, but that’s not what he was asked to do with the material. But a great battle awaits, and it’s going to take everything Themistocles knows to defeat the Persians. She then invites him over so the two can argue and have sex. With Artemisia leading her naval battle, she finds Themistocles a worthy opponent as he finds interesting ways to circumvent her advantages. Faced with Artemisia’s onslaught, Themistocles tries to get all of Greece to team up together to fight the common enemy, but he misses his opportunity to talk with King Leonidas ( Gerard Butler, who is mostly shown in flashback footage) and instead speaks with Queen Gorgo ( Lena Headey) and Dilios ( David Wenham, both from the first film), but will they join him? And while Xerxes fights the Spartans, his adopted sister Artemisia (Green) – who is the most dangerous woman alive and a peerlessly trained killer – is put in charge of their battle ships to conquer Athens’ mighty navy, which is led by Themistocles. Such explains why Xerxes is trying to invade Greece, starting with Sparta. Told in parallel (somewhat) while the Spartans battle elsewhere, the film shows how the Persian leader Xerxes ( Rodrigo Santoro) became the golden god he was, and that it was because new character Themistocles ( Sullivan Stapleton) killed his father, and so Xerxes turned to the dark side for revenge.

300 rise of an empire movie cover