Frank Miller is, deep in his heart, the best of fanboys. He may be conversant in the minutiae of dramatic structure and champion the cause of upholding fine standards of excellence in all creative endeavors. But he also has a sweet tooth for exploitable elements and cool f/x. So when Miller announced he was creating a graphic novel based on the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, you could be assured that despite the fact that it would contain Miller’s usual sense of pace, terse dialogue and attention to thematic cohesion, there would also be plenty of what Joe Bob Briggs used to call the Three B’s: Breasts, Beasts and Blood.
The greatest triumph of the movie version of Sin City is that it translates Miller’s stories so faithfully to the screen, and so it is with 300, resulting in a film with many of the same strengths and weaknesses as the paper version. Leonides (2004’s Phantom of the Opera Gerard Butler, straight from playing another legendary hero in Beowulf & Grendel) is the King of Sparta, a city state famous for producing the fiercest warriors in the world. Trouble is brewing in the east, as the massive armies of the warlord Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) approach from Persia, intent on conquering Greece. In order to deploy troops, Leonides is bound by law to get the blessing of the local holy men, but the monks – and at least one senator – are already secretly on Xerxes’ payroll. In order to get around this complication, Leonides assembles 300 of Sparta’s best fighters to accompany him on an unofficial mission to block the enemy army from entering through a narrow pass in the mountains. Meanwhile, his queen Gorgo (Lena Headey of The Cave) pleads in the senate for permission to send more troops. With no relief in site, the 300 Spartans (plus about 700 allies that we don’t see much of here) dig in to make a stand against a seemingly endless onslaught.
If watching the movie makes you want to check into some texts on ancient Greece, that’s great, but don’t expect the facts and dates to correlate, as Miller and director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead) have no interest in providing literal history lessons. What is portrayed in 300 is the legend, not the fact, and the more dramatically and theatrically that legend is portrayed, the better. As in Sin City, each shot is painted in near black & white palettes that emulate Miller’s panels. This makes for a movie that is operatic to a nearly ridiculous degree in some parts. The Greek traitor Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan of The Bunker) is drawn as not only a turncoat, but as a hideously deformed hunchback getting his revenge for rejection by his own people. Xerxes is not only an eccentric tyrant who believes himself to be a living god, but an actual giant about ten feet tall. His army isn’t just exotically foreign, but a hellish host made up of leprous ninjas, human and animal monsters, and apparent engines of wizardry. This extreme stylization treads the line between the forceful and the ludicrous, and falls over it now and then.
The stunning look of the film can be achieved only by an incredible amount of digital manipulation, so much so that the film falls on the border of the category occupied by Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow and much of the later Star Wars series. This has the unfortunate side effect of making the film look smaller instead of bigger. We may not be able to see the green screen surrounding the actors, but their surroundings look so fantastic that we know they can’t be real. Because of this, we feel the studio even as our eyes try to tell us we’re looking at vast mountains, seas and valleys. Knowing by instinct that we’re looking at artifice, we begin to question every detail. It becomes questionable whether the Spartan warriors are really such supermen, or whether their physiques have been digitally enhanced for maximum manliness. This same effect can account for the film’s R rating, as the shock of the gore effects (heads do roll here – quite a few of them) is tempered by the air of unreality. This is a film that wallows in blood, but as we all know, what shade of blood shown makes a big difference to the ratings board.
What saves the film from tumbling into absurdity is the cast, all of whom are wonderful and do a marvelous job of selling the dialogue and situations. We know in the first act that we’ll eventually see Leonides making a rousing speech to rally the soldiers before a battle (as it turns out, more than once), but Butler roars away and convinces us that he means every word. The performances make the film’s boldness an asset by grounding the fantasy in human terms. When any of the cast makes a grand appeal to the rear seats or hisses a threat in a stage whisper, they’re not asking you to believe it, but they convince you to accept what is happening within the confines of an artificial universe and go along with the play. 300 is a courageous film that serves up a lot of entertainment for its audience, and if its makers only fault is that they asks us to meet them a little ways down the path, its well worth it to put your imagination at their service for 117 minutes.
Copyright © 2007 Brian Thomas, author of the massive book VideoHound's Dragon: Asian Action & Cult Flicks.
LOGIN
REGISTER
RSS
HOME
