Signals a pendulum swing to all style and little substance

Rating: 5/10 (21 March 2010)

The pendulum has a long slow swing in Hollywood from bombastic style, histrionics and showy theatrics to hard-nosed realism, grit and verisimilitude. My generation of film makers would have been embarrassed to make this kind of movie, following on the heels of the early 60s overacted, over-saturated, over-orchestrated movies.
Young people of my generation were sick of that stuff. We celebrated directors like Scorsese, Nichols, Eastwood, Bogdanovich, and even Stanley Kubrick, John Houston who gave us very realistic looking dramas and period pieces, with actors speaking in cadences of everyday people. The more highly awarded and celebrated movies for several decades could be characterized this way.
But then I guess it always has to follow that another generation comes along and finds all of that boring. They want their movies to look like the animation that they've watched on Saturday or their video games.
So it is with this movie which really signaled that swing back. It employs a lot of CGG -- I mean what movie now doesn't. But it also employs a technique to an extreme: high-pass sharpening. Everyone looks shiny and over-modeled. It causes me to ask "What is this film maker trying to hide?" On top of that, every thing is dark and contrasty. Then, of course you have your actors speaking like the wooden-headed Mr. Heston again.
This is a great story. It was over-acted, over-orchestrated and over-color-saturated in the 'original', "The 300 Spartans". I guess my generation missed a chance to just tell the story and show it.