3 Hunna! 300: Rise Of An Empire review

Let’s be honest, shall we? You don’t so much want to know if 300: Rise Of An Empire is good as much as you want to know if it matches the legendary defiance, quotable-laden, violently-beautiful excellence of it’s rather epic predecessor, right? Yeah, I know. And I could tell you that right off the bat, but then this wouldn’t be much of a post & MGMT (the Boss, not the band) would side-eye me into a hunchback curse (& none of us want that TRUST). So instead let’s break down some of the key elements of the two movies to compare/contrast & see what we come up with. INTENSE SLOW-MOTION FIGHTS & GORE: CHECK In terms of emphasizing every sword clash, blood spill, and carefully rendered CGI effect by slowing down the action to a crawl/speeding it up/repeat- it’s essentially the original 300 hopped up on Bane serum. The movie was clearly constructed for 3D consumption as splatter would float & arc as if contemporary art & everything was shot to come right at you. This is for better AND worse, because though visually eye-popping, it actually loses a bit of the visceral grit that gave Leo & his Spartans a human connection to the audience and, in my opinion, made the story memorable & had a young lord dropping the classic word on some ‘04 College Dropout-Yeezy shit. Don’t get me wrong, ROAE has some epic sequences that at times rival even the #bASED original (SPOILER ALERT: Theomisticles goes all Knight-To-Queen 3 Checkmate across 3 or so boats THAT ARE S…