It seems that Zack Snider and Frank Miller are back for another round of comic book adaptations! After bringing us 300, Watchmen, Sucker Punch, and Man of Steel, Snider has signed on for a sequel named 300: Rise of an Empire. This time around, the movie will adapting material from Frank Miller’s own comic sequel to 300, which was entitled “Xerxes”.
As you can see from the trailer, Lena Headey is back to reprise her role as Queen Gorgo of Sparta, while Roderigo Santoro is back as well, reprising the role of the ridiculously tall and pierced man-god Xerxes. David Wehnam is reprising the role of the narrating Dilios. Meanwhile, the beautiful Eva Green plays Artemisia, Xerxes’ ally and naval commander, and Sullivan Stapleton plays General Themosticles – commander of the Greek navy.
As you can also see, the movie picks up where events in the first movie left off, after the Battle of Thermopylae where King Leonidas and his 300 were eventually wiped out. In adapting real history to an over-the-top format yet again, Snider and Miller give us a souped-up version of the Battle of Salamis, the war at sea that followed shortly thereafter.
This confrontation between the Greek and Persian navies occurred off the tip of the Greek mainland, just 20 km away from Athens which had been abandoned to the Persians. It was a desperate fight, but in the end, the Greeks proved victorious, using the home field advantage to trap and defeat the larger Persian forces.
In many ways, this battle would prove to be the beginning of the end for the Persian army, since defeat at sea now meant they could no longer launch offensives into the Peloponnese (home of Sparta and where the Greek Allies were now based) by both land and sea. Marching across the thin and fortified isthmus of Corinth would prove slow and difficult, and Thermopylae had demonstrated that frontal assaults against fortified phalanxes were not effective.
In addition, Xerxes now feared the Greeks could mount a naval offensive on the Hellespont (the land bridge between modern day Turkey and Greece) and cut off his forces from their overland supply routes. On top of that, he was dealing with rebellions within the conquered territories and had to tend to those as well.
As a result, the war would consist of sieges against rebelling states until the decisive land battle of Plataea, north of Athens, (shown at the end of 300) and the naval battle at Mycale off the coast of Turkey would take place a year later and drive the Persians out of Greece and the Aegean for good.
Honestly, not sure if I’ll catch this one. Sure, the last one was cinematic action porn, and fun if you ignored the historical inaccuracies and alleged attempts to draw a connection between the past and the “war on terror”. But I think its fair to say this is Snider and Miller’s attempt to cash in again and really doesn’t have much magic to it. And without Gerard Butler screaming martial slogans, it just seems flat.
“THIS IS SPARTAAAA!” No, this is a sequel. And oftentimes, they suck! But then again, I do love the history and there have been cases where the sequel was even better than the original… we shall see! And of course, we can all enjoy the trailers in the meantime!
Stories by Williams 