Krishna
This movie is a sequel to the wildly successful 300. The story starts before 300 looking at the death of Darius through an arrow by Thermistocles and continues until after the emergence of Xerxes and after the battle shown in 300 where 300 Spartans stop the Persian invasion in its tracks.
It also has as much veracity in its historical narration as 300 had. It is a very glorified look with a lot of fiction mixed in. Only the basis of some of the characters seems to be true. The rest is pure yarn, meant to entertain, not educate. The producers claim that a lot more of it is true but even they admit that Darius, the Great King of Persia, did not die of an arrow from the Greek warrior Thermistocles. And the fact the Xerxes bathed in some golden river to win superpowers? Do I need to even tell you that this is hocus?
In any case, the movie has the same style as the original 300 (exaggerated style, totally pro Greek story telling) but is not as good. The story wanders a bit more but even more so, you do not see Sullivan Stapleton giving life to Thermistocles as much as Gerard Butler gave to King Leonedas in the original 300. His acting is a little wooden, he seems a bit too soft spoken to be the ferocious warrior of the Greek history. This is my own opinion perhaps, not a consensus, but this is what it seemed to me. The bonding and the human aspect is a little forced.
In this prequel-sequel, Xerxes is not the main villain, as he was in 300. That honour goes to Artemesia, the warrior deputy of Xerxes. She is a Greek lady who changed sides to the Persians and rose to be the second most powerful person in the Persian empire. However, Eva Green does not inspire as one of the fiercest and the most beautiful female warrior for some reasons. To show anger or passion, she has a special way of squinting her eyes and baring her teeth that is, to me, disconcerting.
And then there is the exaggeration, which, though expected if you saw 300, can be grating. There is Thermistocles and Artemisia who can reach through their arrow incredible distances, with incredible accuracy while none of their peers can. And when they have these advantages, they sometime throw these away to indulge in sword fight for some unfathomable reason.
We learn that Artemisia hates Greece because she watched her parents murdered by Greeks and she forced to be a prostitute and left to die, only to be picked up by a Persian ambassador and brought up as a Persian.
The battle of Salamis, where the Greeks and Spartans gained a decisive victory against the Persians is well told.
All in all, not excellent casting, not excellent acting, but watchable for its visual effects.
Let us say a 4/10
– – Krishna