It is 490 BC and it is raining. Themistocles, the Athenian general, is at Marathon, preparing to shoot an arrow at the great Persian King Darius I. Xerxes, Darius’ son, is there to witness the barb as it flies and strikes a blow that will be fatal and, presumably, deeply humiliating. The Persians prided themselves on their superiority at archery.
The opening scenes of 300: Rise of an Empire are the most strained, and bizarre, in the whole film. Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro – you’ll never swoon at Karl in Love Actually again) reappears at his father’s bedside as the dying man advises him to leave the Greeks to their own ways (‘an Athenian experiment called Democracy’, apparently), and Artemisia I of Caria (Eva Green), a Greek queen now allied with the Persians, plucks the arrow from the wound as though it were a stray hair from her brow, and he dies.
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