300 is good, bloody fun, though it often reaches for both emotional and philosophical effects that are unearned. Director Zack Snyder and his co-screenwriters Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon have adapted the Frank Miller/Lynn Varley graphic novel with a good amount of visual fidelity and have hewed to some of the facts about the historical Battle of Thermopylae.
For those who missed the history lesson, this famous conflict is a tale of a pre-Christian-era clash between the Spartan King Leonidas and three hundred of his best warriors against the might of the vast armies commanded by King Xerxes, self-proclaimed god-on-Earth of the Persian Empire. Amazingly, Leonidas’ forces held a pass known as “the Hot Gates” for several days, despite being insanely outnumbered. 300 gives us the battle, the events that lead up to it and some Spartan political intrigue during it. The focus is King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), who responds violently when the emissary of King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), arrives in Sparta demanding surrender. Xerxes is poised to invade and Leonidas believes that the Spartans may be able to defend their territory, and all of Greece, by virtue of their superiority as warriors. When he cannot get a blessing to actually go to war from the priests, he takes 300 men as “bodyguards” and goes out for “a stroll.”
The combination of live actors and CGI backgrounds is very striking, as is the look of the film overall. Snyder goes between extreme desaturation, washing scenes in grays and yellows (the look is reminiscent of not only Robert Rodriguez’s film adaptation of Miller’s Sin City, but also Pitch Black), and very saturated full color. For that matter, the look of the warriors is remarkable – the actors and what one guesses is an army of trainers deserve a lot of credit for making a whole lot of men look good while fighting in what amounts to leather Speedos, red capes, the occasional helmet and nothing else. This seems unlikely battle gear, but nobody seems the least self-conscious (though it would be interesting to see an outtake reel). The Persians’ varied armor is splendid, varied and malevolent-looking, going for and usually achieving the Darth Vader effect with all sorts of menacing invention.
As for the fight scenes, Snyder simply creates a great “wow” factor, with huge masses of people, arrows, weapons and impressive geysers of blood providing images that have powerful impact both in motion and as still frames. He borrows a bit from Peter Jackson in the look of the screen-filling armies and their giant beasts of war – the imagery is true to Miller, but the way it works on film inevitably reminds us of Lord of the Rings.
Even without the comparison to Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien, though, it’s hard not to notice that 300 keeps going for both tragedy and message that it hasn’t backed up in the preceding drama. Xerxes is a tyrant and we see Leonidas being a good husband and father and a general who is both compassionate and inspiring, but what exactly is he referring to when he bellows about “freedom”? Historically correct as it is, since what we’re told first off about the Spartans is that they practice infanticide on any male children who don’t look like they’ll make good warriors, they keep slaves, are under some thrall to a body of unhealthy priests, etc., and we’re not told exactly what Xerxes does (apart from throw orgies and literally step all over his slaves), this has the ring of hollow rhetoric. We don’t need to know exactly how Sparta works to be impressed with the titular 300, but since its moral superiority is being preached throughout the film, some evidence of this apart from the buffness of its fighters would help support what we’re being told. Likewise, our overly helpful narrator keeps telling us what characters are feeling, which is not only redundant (when we see Leonidas awake at night among his troops, we can figure out for ourselves that he’s thinking of the next day’s battle, thanks) but finally actually makes us suspicious – if the filmmakers feel that they need to explain what we’re seeing to such an extent, maybe they’re not showing us as much as we think we’re getting onscreen. Apart from Leonidas, we don’t get much sense of the warriors as characters – they’ve all pretty much go the same hell-for-leather attitude – so when anything happens to them as individuals, we don’t experience a sense of loss. Ironically, Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, because it never trumpeted its emotional moments, had a lot more sense of humanity and genuine grief.
Butler has got a really tough role here – he’s required to spend a good deal of it yelling at the top of his lungs – but he pulls it off as well as it can be done, and in the quieter moments projects a sense of charismatic, thoughtful compassion. Lena Headey as his devoted, spirited queen is both regal and sexy, and Dominic West is fine as an arrogant politician. David Wenham (Faramir in Lord of the Rings) seems suitably orator-like as the Spartan chosen to tell the tale and Santoro has a touch of otherworldliness as Xerxes.
Another observation: while no doubt true to the Miller/Varley original, one does start to wonder why all the good guys are white (actual Spartans would look Greek, not Anglo-Saxon) and all the bad guys are black, Middle Eastern and Asian.
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