Every time a sword swipes a battling warrior, the screen fills up with a lake's worth of spurting blood, to the extent that you really start hoping that one of the film's character's suffers a paper cut, just to see what happens. The rest of the film's over-the-topness is pretty purposeful as well. The ruthlessness of Green's character is taken to extremes that meld Medea to the cheesiest serial you can name, and is hence delicious. 'Rise of an Empire,' directed by Noam Munro (who also made ' Smart People,' which clearly established his 3D action movie bonafides…no wait…) is entirely more engaging by dint of being absolutely impossible to take even a little bit seriously. I hated the Zack-Snyder-directed '300' with a passion: aside from its in-your-face hateful war-mongering sentiments and the aforementioned homophobia, the thing looked as if it had been shot through lenses that had been smeared with dog feces prior to each take.

While the first '300,' based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, was relentlessly male-driven in a way that was both relentlessly homoerotic and blithely homophobic, the introduction (no doubt historically inaccurate) of Green's character to the combat changes the sexual dynamic in a way that's pretty ridiculous and also kind of jaw-dropping. And this naval commander, an unusual one by anybody's standards, is both intrigued and vexed by the Athenian, who goes by the name Themistocles, and is played by a stalwart Sullivan Stapleton. They're coming by ship, and the navy is commanded by the golden boy's sister, Artemisia, played by the sexually intimidating Eva Green, who's going Full Diamanda Galas here, only without the singing. There's one Greek fellow, an Athenian, who believes in the 'experiment' called 'democracy,' and he wants the Spartans to back him up as the fey Persians, spurred by possibly homosexual golden (literally!) boy Xerxes, come to lay waste to his model city.

300 rise of an empire movie back drops