Starring Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, and Lena Headey. Rated 18A. Now playing.

The movie that launched a thousand GIFs, 300 was the surprise hit of 2007. Reverentially faithful to the Frank Miller graphic novel, director Zack Snyder delivered a massive chocolate lava cake of macho posturing, fake blood, and genuine history. The movie made a star of Gerard Butler as the indomitable Leonidas of Sparta, who has coasted ever since in lesser vehicles that do not permit him to chop arms off while rocking a pointy beard.

Now the Snyder team (with the actual directing duties turned over to Noam Murro) has reunited to explain, more or less, what was happening in the rest of Greece while the three hundred Spartans were enjoying the apotheosis of their death cult with several hundred thousands of Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae.

The focus is on Themistokles (Sullivan Stapleton), a brilliant Athenian general who conceived of a rapid counterattack by sea requiring every available warship in the Aegean, effectively requiring the city-states to unite as a single nation for the first time.

Playing Themistokles as a rigid leader torn by private guilts, Stapleton is not nearly as charismatic (or yoked) as Butler. The more compelling portraits are of Artemisia, admiral of the Persians (Eva Green) and Queen Gorgo of Sparta (Lena Headey). These dynamic women represent contrasting expressions of revenge, the one avid and confident, the other cold and indifferent, but both committed to victory on their own terms.

All of this subtext is of course secondary to the style. With striking images of sack and plunder, heroic speeches aplenty, and obnoxious villains (Rodrigo Santoro is back as Xerxes), this sepia-tinged fantasia of bloodlust could be seamlessly intercut with the original 300. That makes it something of a derivative product, the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy of waxed-chest epics.

On the other hand, it's March. You could see Frozen again, or watch people take arrows to the gut in slow motion. Pretty easy choice.