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300: Rise of an Empire. 3.5/10: Okay. For starters, I genuinely enjoyed the first 300 movie. I felt that it was able to capture the feeling and cinematic brilliance of the source material (not entirely a difficult task, given that the source material runs a “burly” 117 pages) but I felt that they accomplished a rare goal: they were able to make a movie that gave superb translation to a graphic novel. Then there came this movie.. 300: Rise of an Empire. My complaints with this movie start in the first 5 minutes of this movie. At the end of the original 300 they bookend the story beautifully by finishing the story where they began, with Dilios finishing his tale and leading a larger than 300 army into battle against the Persian horde. The beginning of 300: Rise of an Empire is obviously written by someone who did not read 300 and did not see the movie 300. The scene of Dilios riding with his large army to fight the Persian Horde? Didn’t happen. Dilios losing his eye and becoming the person cursed with a long life so that he may pass on the tale of the mighty 300 who lost their lives so that Sparta may remain free? Didn’t happen. You see, the main army that fights against the Persian horde in 300: Rise of an Empire are the Athenians.. do you remember that scene in 300 where King Leonidas shames the Athenians into revealing that their army are filled with artisans, peasants, and potters? Well, not any more.. apparently.. now the Athenians are an army filled with soldiers that are equal if not better than the entire Spartan elite combined. They have the same determination, they have the same training, they even have the same ability to slow down time so that they can enjoy their superb skills at killing in slow-mo. Moreover, their bald-headed coward of a leader that was more than happy to guard the paths that would see no battle in 300 has now been replaced by a superhuman who is overtly as bloodthirsty as Leonidas and has quite the charisma when it comes to pep-talking his soldiers. The reviews are not entirely misleading though, Eva Green’s character/performance is top-notch. Genuinely if this were a stand-alone movie that had nothing to with 300.. it might not have been so bad.. but rewriting a perfectly good movie and shitting on what is easily one of the better Action/War movies of the last 10 years? You better bring a better than perfect movie to the table.. not some half-assed passionless grab for cash.