If you’ve been checking out TIT for TAT over the last month, or read my Best TV of 2014 (so far) article, you’ll know I’m pretty big into Penny Dreadful, and Eva Green’s performance in it. With the show having wrapped up its first season last Sunday, I figured I could probably effectively wean myself off the Green dragon with a little movie methadone. The chosen flick: 300: Rise of an Empire, sequel to the sword ‘n sandals, pecs ‘n ceps slash ‘em up from 2006.
Basically everything I’d heard about the long (relative to industry standards) gestating sequel made it sound like a poor imitation of Zack Snyder’s surprise hit, but that Eva Green’s performance as the film’s villain was not to be missed. Turns out, the consensus is pretty accurate. 300: Rise of an Empire is an amateur act compared to the original, which, while in addition to being generally xenophobic and jingoistic, was just kinda okay. The sequel is a pretty forgettable maelstrom of syrupy CG blood and green screen backgrounds of questionable consistency, but my feelings for Rise of an Empire wound up being a little more complicated than I had initially anticipated.
This was a surprising turn, considering how brain-dead the first 300 was by design. That’s where its power came from: a singular, Spartan-esque devotion to absurd action imbued with an embarrassingly sincere belief in how badass and awesome it all is. Now inured to an American military presence in the Middle East, audiences probably have an easier time appreciating 300’s basic visceral pleasures in 2014 than they might have in 2006, when a film about suspiciously Caucasian ancient Greeks defending their homeland against a marauding horde of evil darker-skinned people felt more patronizingly patriotic.
In contrast, 300: Rise of Whatever, Just so Long As We Can put “Rise” in the Title, forsakes the straightforwardness of the original by having to figure out a way to get a sequel out of a film that didn’t lend itself to one. At once a prequel, midquel, and sequel, 300 and One Dalmatians has to expand the world of 300 in order to justify its narrative, which is a problem, given the us-vs.-them simplicity of the world Zack Snyder and Frank Miller created. Themistocles (played by sentient abs and muscles masquerading as a leading man named Sullivan Stapleton) and his rabble of Athenian civilians can’t hold a candle to Gerard Butler and King Leonidas’ band of hell-diners from the first film. The charisma of the meathead Spartan’s was a result of their desire and competence for combat being matched by Snyder’s own. The Athenians, being a more mindful folk who occasionally enjoy a carb or two, fight for more ideological purposes, centered on freedom as a citizen’s right, instead of freedom by force.
Unsurprisingly, it’s more entertaining to watch dudes slice off limbs to grab their freedom instead of get into senate debates about how best to maintain it, so 300-2 lacks the direct thrust of its predecessor. This thematic hamstringing is borne out narratively via start ‘n stop combat encounters that, again, overcomplicate the formula. 300 plotted itself with all the nuance of a videogame, but that meant each battle had increased stakes and difficulty for the force of good guys whose numbers were literally the first thing you knew about the movie. In what’s the running theme for the sequel, Rise of an Empire clutters things up by shifting the battles out to the sea, where unclear numbers, tactics, and direction extrapolates the conflict beyond the bare essentials, making it hard to discern what’s going on until Themistocles tells you who’s winning or losing.
For failing to deliver on the most important thing the franchise is known for, it’d be easy to write off Rise of an Empire as just a poor imitation, were it not for the sore, Green thumb at the center of it: Artemisia, the first interesting character in the entire series, one that Rise of An Empire nonetheless finds a way to screw-up. Artemisia, as played by Eva Green, is the best thing about 300 as a franchise, full stop. As the secret puppet master behind evil god-king Xerxes, and commander of his navy, Artemisia’s narrative purpose is to raise the stakes of the sequel by suggesting that this was the real battle that changed the course of history, stopped the bad guy, saved freedom, yadda yadda yadda. It’s the one concession to sequel-dom that the film manages to get right, as inventing a previously unmentioned villain that’s more engaging and dangerous than the first’s actual does give the sequel a villain that’s more engaging and dangerous than the first’s.
In fact, the biggest mistake director Noam Murro and co-screenwriter Snyder make is in giving Green too much to work with. Whereas the good guys are being led by a cut-‘n-paste protagonist whose brooding idealism makes him an absolute drag, Artemisia, and Green’s performance of her, are ferocious fun. Green seems to be the only one aware of the sequel’s slack pacing, playing the villainess as so bored by the talky bits that she has to frequently dismember and kill her subordinates in theatrical fashion just to keep everyone on their toes. Making out with severed heads and engaging in gloriously absurd sex-jitsu with Stapleton, Green’s over-the-top performance is the first in the entire series to match the heights of ridiculous cheese that have constituted the franchises’ bread and butter, but thus far been mistaken for being super cool.
There’s just one major problem: the foundation for Artemisia’s actual badassness is hack bullshit that both dredges up the racial grossness of the first film, and adds a brand new layer of sexual insensitivity on top that the sequel can call its own. Whereas Xerxes was a simplistic and oversized villain to match everything else that was oversized and simplistic about 300, Artemisia is presented as a brilliant tactician with a motivation that’s fucking Shakespearean by the franchises’ standards. The choice to see the conflict at least in part from the antagonist’s eyes mucks with the series’ racial color-coding, where the only audience perspectives belong to the Greeks (read: whites), and the bad guys are an anonymous dark-skinned mob. In order to therefore justify a white actress playing an identifiable human being and leader within the Persian army, Rise of an Empire concocts a backstory that, as is the case with everything else with the film, complicates things in ways that 300 is too simple-minded to handle.
In flashback, it’s explained that, despite being Greek herself, Artemisia’s family was raped and murdered by Greek hoplites, and sold into sexual slavery. Eventually abandoned and taken in by a Persian emissary (Peter Mensah, who you might remember getting booted down a well in 300), her hatred for Greece is nurtured until she become a ruthless killing machine and chief advisor for the Persian leadership. The backstory automatically makes her the most complex character in the entire franchise, basing her arc on a matter of personal grievance instead of nationalistic, or cultural ones. In part, the purpose for the deeper shading is so that her relationship with Themistocles can form the emotional spine of the film, as the two become star-crossed potential-lovers fighting on the opposite sides of a war.
It doesn’t work for two reasons: 1) Stapleton is a stoic drip that Green acts circles around 2) the explanation for Artemisia’s motivation is utterly infuriating. Artemisia’s sexual abuse as a child is never explicitly addressed or mentioned outside of the flashback in which it is shown, and that’s precisely the problem. In the world of 300, as is often the case for historical or fantasy fiction, the only possible way to explain female agency in a male-dominated conflict is through rape. She’s not some helpless bystander being threatened by the enemy, and she’s not the supportive partner of the male hero that needs protecting. She, therefore, does not fit into the two boxes this sort of story typically allows for, and so the only conceivable way Snyder and Miller think they can justify her becoming a powerful agent of control in that story is because she was raped.
Her desire to see Greece burn isn’t because, you know, her whole family was killed by the Greeks, and therefore has a justifiable thirst for revenge. And it’s not because, oh I don’t know, she was sold into slavery, and the Greeks are still a slave state, and holy shit, why are we rooting for the guys who trumpet freedom while being sent into combat on slave-driven ships? No, the thinking goes, the only way for an audience to possibly believe she is this devoted to her cause is because she was raped, rape being the only thing that could inspire a woman in 300 to take matters into her own hands (Note that Lena Headey, as Leonidas’ wife, gets to pick up a sword this time out, but only in the wake of her attempts at agency last time resulting in her trading her body to achieve a plot point the sequel then decides was unnecessary).
“But it’s accurate to the gender politics of the historical era and setting!” cry those totally unperturbed by rape as lazy shorthand, while completely ignoring how FUCKING INSANE IT IS TO THINK THAT 300 OWES ANYTHING TO HISTORICAL ACCURACY. For chrissake, the first film has Leonidas and his bros calling the Greeks they meet a bunch of boy-lovers, while ignoring the Spartans having patron-heroes of pederasty. Authenticity to historical sexual norms has never been on the menu. Even if it was, 300 has always been a fantasy fiction, not a historical one. Do we not remember there being, like, lobster monsters in the first 300 when we say that rape is necessary to a female character’s backstory for the world to be believable?
The pernicious element is that casual use of rape in this sort of fiction is meant as a distancing mechanism for the viewer, leaving them disgusted at the potential for it to happen “back then” or in an alternate world, but also feeling smugly safe in thinking the only context in which such acts can occur is when civilization or social moors don’t teach people better. While rarely is the act ever condoned, it’s more often than not trivialized by being in service of narrative development of someone who isn’t the victim, or in the case of 300, exploitative titillation.
Rape is too often used as an ugly, creatively bankrupt ploy to engender audience sympathy for female characters. Film in particular is guilty of this, as there’s almost never enough time to explore how sexual violence affects the abused, especially if it’s a woman, as their arc is usually only existing merely as a springboard for the male protagonist’s. TV has a better track record, with recent shows like The Americans, The Shield, and Spartacus having the time to actually give a shit about sexual assault survivors, whether they’re male, female, in the present day or in the past. For film to play the rape card without resorting to exploitation, it needs to make it an integral part of the story, not a writer’s tool meant to solve the non-existent problem of getting audiences to identify with female characters that exist outside of the dependent/victim dichotomy that exists for women in fiction.
What makes Rise of an Empire so frustrating is how unnecessary and superfluous its inclusion of the subject matter is. Cut this ten-second scene from the story, and you do nothing to change Artemisia’s motivation, progression, or believability as an action hero in this hyper-stylized world. Or better yet, keep the scene, and show how it affects both her as the antagonist, and the Themistocles as the protagonist trying to defend a nation responsible for her mistreatment in the first place.
But it can’t do that: over-complication is the undoing of Rise of an Empire as a film, so of course it treats rape with the simplest of understandings. In the world of 300, it’s not enough for a character like Artemisia to be charismatic but flawed, ambitious but headstrong, confident but searching, in order for her to hang with the guys, an interchangeable bunch of non-entities the film automatically assumes we’ll be invested in, despite lacking any distinguishing characteristics. Nope, autonomy and agency for a female character must be earned in the crucible of sexual abuse.
Look, expecting anything close to an insightful look at gender dynamics out of 300 is not something I ever thought I’d get hung-up on. Hell, the second shot of the sequel is a woman being stripped naked and dragged off kicking and screaming. It’s not surprising that a film based on, and made for the impulses of thirteen year-old boys doesn’t see why mistreatment of its female characters is a big deal. But that it gets so close to actually bucking the trends of the genre by giving audiences a female character -even a villain-, they can identify with, and root for amidst the bloody priapic spectacle, only to sabotage that character with 10-seconds of inconsiderate writing, is more than just disappointing. It’s kinda heartbreaking.