300: Rise Of An Empire

Talked about this in my Humanities class at my college. Talk of it ranged from inaccuracy historically, to seems interesting to "Seems like the type of film someone wants to see sweaty half-naked men".

Seems like a flick that will help me kill boredom so yeah..why not? Anyone else?

As you might gather from my handle, I would rather drink boiling hot chip oil mixed with Fosters lager than pay money to watch another one of these idiotic neo-fascist pieces of historical inversion. If I even bother to see the damn thing, I'll be doing it for free (yo-ho-fiddle dee dee) and only for the purpose of writing a long, angry review about how sodding stupid and quasi-racist they are.

edited 24th Feb '14 1:28:42 PM by Achaemenid

Ahahahha

Are you laughing at my stellar wit or at my outrage?

I think this movie should have came out 5 years ago when there was still actual hype for 300.

That said, I probably will go and see it during my Spring Break.

@ Achaemenid

Both

Heh, the first time I saw a commercial for this, I saw the Xerxes design and said, "This looks like a sequel to 300." Considering they've also got Pompeii coming out, you can understand why I only said it looked like one. Cue the title coming up. Nailed it.

I'm not sure how they're gonna sell a 300 sequel when the only returning character is Xerxes.

I also saw Themistocles and the Queen in a commercial. Xerxes and them pretty much ARE the only characters who can return who had any clout on the movie. Maybe the traitor guide, but I haven't seen him in any trailers, and I forgot if he died.

Quasimodo didn't die.

Then maybe he will in this one.

Yeah Gorgo's in it. A less evil Lena Headey but with more infanticide.

Well, unlike my fellow tropee above, I loved 300. For probably a lot of the reasons why he hates it. Plus it had Gerard Butler and a script based on one of my fave Frank Miller comic books. Plus one of the best examples of the Unreliable Narrator trope in film history. Seriously, I can't be the only one who picked up on that one (and according to this very wiki, I'm not) Of course Dilios is going to talk up the Spartans to his fellow Greeks (and talk down the Persians, natch)- it was his sodding job in the film to do exactly that.

Mr. Butler isn't in this one so my interest is a bit down for it from what I had for its predecessor though.

The "Dilios is an Unreliable Narrator" defense has never cut much ice with me, because if he really is one, then he's an extremely poorly-executed example. The point of having one is to tell us something about the character, and to tell a story, which if it isn't the truth, then is at least worth telling. Neither is really present in 300.

And it seems that the sequel seems to cleave completely to Dilios's version of events, so unless he's returning it seems to be Jossed by the sequel.

Nuevo today.

They better cut to the end of Platea battle and show how awesomely Sparta, Greece crushed the fuck out of the Persians. That and see Dilos too. Historically, he was a reckless and total badass mofo. No award for war badassery be damned was still cool.

IIRC, wasn't the "no award for badassery" specifically because Aristodemus got too into a badass rampage and decided that self-preservation was less important than slaughtering the Persians?

edited 25th Feb '14 7:28:01 PM by TheAirman

Is it weird that the only character here I'm really looking forward to seeing is Eva Green's Queen Artemisia?

I kind of agree with Achaemenid on this series. It's all preposterous and somewhat racist. But I actually enjoy these movies in a So Bad Its Good Way. It's so ridiculously over-the-top and historical inaccurate I don't even get mad.

I mean the movie turns into a unintentional comedy when the slave-holding-spartans start talking about "an age of freedom" or Xerxes blatantly ignores every single rule of Zoroastranism and nobody calls him out on it, or the persian army being composed of a bunch of Frankenstein monsters. It's just amazing.

Things like Leonidas being virtually unable to say anything without shouting or Dillios narrating everything with enough drama to fill three full soap operas are just the icing on the cake.

As for the sequel, I'll watch it for pretty much the same reasons and an addendum: I find Themistocles to be a very interesting figure, and I want to see if they'll mention Sincinnus.

Agreed with Gaon.

The HAM is amazing!!!

@The Airman

According to The Other Wiki :

So while the smear on his name for being 1 of the 300 that left Leonidas's side was removed he wasn't awarded for being awesome despite being a one-eyed monster on the battlefield.

Suicide's only honorable in Eastern cultures. In the West it's considered cowardice, and even in modern days, if someone does something dishonorable enough late in life, it often strips them of earlier earned honors.

Probably going to go and it because, for all its problems with quasi-racism and ridiculous "defenders of freederp" dreck, I really liked 300's cinematography and art design.

Indeed. Of the two, I think the Persians were actually more free than any of the Greeks. Women were barely secondary to men there, and their normal citizens were no more restricted than the majority of Greece.

Economically the Persians were pretty bad off. Xerxes's idea of economy was to loot all the mines of silver and gold and consolidate all of it in his own vaults for mercs and diplomatic maneuvers. Regular citizens were lucky to get any of that.

Oh yeah, definitely. If we take a good look at things you could actually say the Persians were the "good guys" of this conflict. They respected other cultures, abolished slavery (in stark contrast to the Spartans who had a veritable shitload of slaves and treated them like objects), and held women in high regard.

So rooting for the Greeks is really hard in this particular conflict.