Samuel Garringer
The Communicator

First off, this is not a movie to take your small children to; it involves blood, blood, tits, and more blood.
SPOILER ALERT, the plot: During the time that Greece is under attack by Whoever, Greece requires all of its cities to join together to thwart the enemy, the Persians. However, some of the cities care only about themselves and don’t want to risk their people’s lives in the fight. The storyline is of a group of men, led by General Themistocles of Athens, to unite the cities and people to fight as one nation, for Greece.
The whole battle is at sea, fought from ships. With the battle plan of smashing into each other and men jumping from ship to ship, slaughtering each other.
Most action movies where the scene has a lot of detail the director usually speeds up the action movements of the scene.
But the director, Noam Murro, used a different approach.
During the film, Murro adds as much detail as he can, mostly of blood, and slows the scene down.
The slow motion shots allow you to truly see the gruesome costs of fighting in that era; fighting with sword, spear and only a shield as your defence.
Also with slowing it down, ladies you’ll like this, it really brings your focus to the physical requirements to fight in hand to hand combat.

The movie also brings light to the creative tactics for that era, with the limited supplies.
For example, spoiler alert, when Themistocles, who is played by Sullivan Stapleton, and his handful of ships go out to sea for the final time in the movie. Themistocles requested a horse be under deck. That way while the ships are crashing into each other, Themistocles can ride the horse across the ships deck faster than on foot. His goal is to get to Artemisia.
Artemisia is supposed to be known by her beauty lustfully, but I don’t see it. Eva Green plays the role of a scary and crazy woman in power perfectly, but as a beautiful woman… not seeing it. Her character is focused too much on the creepy side to turn me on.
And as crazy as it is, Artemisia and Themistocles (leaders of opposing nations) have one unneeded sex scene, but at least the director only involves upper body nudity.
The director leaves you with a melancholy feeling about the final battle. You see the start of the battle and the most intense struggles. Murro sets up the final scenes by showing you what the end results of the fight will be, but doesn’t show you the actual ending.
In conclusion; the movie was great, the acting was perfect and the battle scenes gave me the rush that makes you want to fight. It was awesome.