In Ancient Greece, a group of 300 Spartan warriors are all that stand against an invincible army. A vivid, bloodthirsty adaptation of the graphic novel by 'Sin City' creator Frank Miller, from the director of the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead
The legendary Battle of Thermopylae may have first made it to the screen in 1962's The 300 Spartans, but this new cinematic incarnation of the story is an historical epic unlike any other. The latest example of 'virtual studio' filmmaking, where actors are shot against blue screens and sparse sets while the surrounding environments are generated through CGI, it's a stylised action adventure that takes the sword and sandal genre and pushes it in an exaggerated, dream-like direction. Transferring the dynamic visuals of the original graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynne Varley to the big screen, in a similar manner to previous Miller adaptation Sin City, the result is a delirious, turbo-charged roar of a movie that plays like Spartacus on bizarre drugs.
Set in 480 BC, the story kicks off with an introduction to the kingdom of Sparta, where a civilisation centred around combat has created some of the finest warriors ever seen, and is ruled over by the fiercely honourable King Leonidas (Butler). When a messenger arrives from the tyrannical god-king Xerxes, telling Leonidas that Sparta will be the next kingdom to fall unless it surrenders, the king's immediate reaction is to kick the news bearer and his bodyguards down the nearest well.
Zack Snyder's 300 is a big thumping roar of an action movie that aspires to something more only in its closing sequences. Until then it achieves the popcorn movie goal of depicting battles with honor but without humanity in an entertaining fashion.
Gallons of blood are spilt, thousands of limbs are severed, and numerous heads are lopped off, yet there is never the slightest bit of tension generated or concern expended in behalf of the soldiers involved. Director Snyder keeps the pace swift for the most part, though the multitude of extended slow motion footage makes it feel like an American football game broadcast -- there's even an announcer, er, narrator.
The plot description is elegant in its simplicity: 300 Spartans stand off an army of millions of Persians. What I thought about while watching one of the battles was John Woo's Hard Boiled or any number of Hong Kong martial arts movies in which the fights seem to go on forever. That's how they feel in 300, but the difference is that the action is so stylized -- color tinted to make it difficult to make out facial expressions, the Spartans all boasting six-pack abs and looking identical, the blood escaping from bodies in small and large blobs rather than spurting -- that it becomes difficult to be caught up in it.
The advantage of, say, the Woo picture is the action is so fast and furious that, subconsciously, it feels even more violent than it is, because your mind is filling in what the eye is not seeing. That's also the secret to the best horror movies (my first thought is Psycho's shower scene), where the carnage may be bloody, but we tend to fill in the blanks with something even worse.
Here we have plenty of slow-motion slicing of heads and swords ramming through bodies, but it's so slow that you simply admire the ability of the computer artist/make-up people.
The few actors we can recognize have trouble making much of an impression. Gerard Butler is a terrific snarler as King Leonidas, but I kept expecting him to burst into song, a la the Phantom of the Opera. Dominic West was a nasty, one-dimensional villain, and Lena Headey brought a degree of nuance as the Queen.
It would be easy enough to accept 300 as simple entertainment were it not for the inclusion of the Spartans' motivation as a big part of the closing sequences. Until it reached this point, I had dismissed the concerns I'd heard about beforehand as desperately thin, but it becomes clear -- at least to me -- that the filmmakers want the Spartans to be held up as shining examples of goodness. (If they'd expressed even one iota of doubt about the Spartans, I might be persuaded that they want the audience to question their own feelings about whether the Spartans as a society were to be admired or condemned for their methods, but no such shadow of doubt is ever even hinted at.) That's where the picture breaks down completely -- it's too shallow to hold up to close inspection, too thin to bear the weight of introspection.
The way that the Persians are repeatedly identified as Asians, and depicted as brutal nameless faceless hordes, is a standard movie convention. The Persian army may very well have been the most evil ever to walk the face of the earth. But we never see that -- we just see that they number into the hundreds of thousands, that they are relentless, and that their King is very very tall, thinks he is a god, and likes facial jewelry. Sure, they kill and pillage, but isn't that what the Spartans do? The Spartans insistence on breeding great warriors -- illustrated by their disposal of infants who don't fit their "perfect" criteria -- seems just as wicked as anything the Persians do. But it is the Spartans that we are meant to root for.
For a big dumb night out, yes, 300 may fit the bill. But as an invitation to nuanced thought, or to imagine that it has anything on its mind besides presenting the Spartans as a great team of nationalist warriors worthy of imitation, it falls flat.
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