a dirty shame

Rating: 3/10 (16 August 2007)

Let's start with the good -- the visual style is clearly this film's main asset. The filmmakers have confidence in the ability of the images to tell the most important aspects of the story. For example Xerxes' coins  we get a prolonged scene of the temple priests (who, strangely enough, look kind of like the aliens in "V") admiring the gold they received from Xerxes to give a negative prophecy, and then later gold falls out of the purse of the politician Theron (Dominic West), revealing his corruption. But a lot of movies, especially nowadays, would have to dumb it down by having some dude say out loud "hey, that's Xerxes' coin!" or something like that. Like I said, "300" has confidence in its visual storytelling.
And it needs to  because the dialog is terrible. Liberally taking its best lines from Rudolph Mate's 1962 film "The 300 Spartans" isn't enough to solve the dialog problems. I'm not sure if a lot of the actors were poor or if they were poorly directed, because I haven't seen many of them in other films. But I've seen more compelling dialog in episodes of "Xena: Warrior Princess". In fact the whole film felt to me somewhat like a high budget TV-show. The entire environment is so hyper-stylized that I just couldn't imagine myself into that space if you know what I mean. It was interesting to look at, but hard to look into or to imagine that it could be a real space in any world. For instance, whenever the Spartans drove people or animals off the ledge, you never saw how those people or animals actually got from the open plain into this tiny space where they would allow themselves to be forced off the cliff. The film didn't create a realistic space for these events to take place in, and in fact the battle in general was not shown in any kind of way that was interesting or realistic from a strategic standpoint. The Spartan king Leonidas (Gerald Butler) talks about how they fight in a phalanx and even one Spartan dying will ruin their strategy, but then when they actually fight they only fight in the phalanx formation at the very beginning of the battles and quickly dissolve into random groups of fighters. Everyone except the Spartans seems to have been inflicted with a "Matrix-esque" slow-motion disease so that the Spartans can stab and spear them at will.
The great weakness for me in the film is that it takes itself too seriously. With a little dose of camp or even just irony, the film might be palatable. But this film actually has less humor than "Shindler's List" intentional humor anyway, because I laughed at a lot of the idiotic scenes like Spartan warriors raising their spears in the air to the strains of generic heavy metal music and a King Xerxes who looks like he just emerged from an S&M boutique. I watched incredulously as one of Leonidas' men called to his son at the end of the battle; the son was so distracted by an old man shouting his name on the other side of the battlefield that he didn't hear a large horse coming up behind him and cutting his head off. Then in the aftermath of this event, we are treated to a cheesy speech by the bereaved father that made me laugh out loud.
I can't forget to mention the film's extremely questionable politics and morals. I recently watched "The 300 Spartans" and was not surprised to see a lot of stuff in the film that would today be very "politically incorrect". But it was surprising to see so many of these elements both repeated and embellished in this new version. Kind of refreshing actually that they didn't bother to make concessions to modern politics. But it's not like the film's creators can cry "historical accuracy" (after all, in real history there were no lizard-priests in Greece nor mutants with axes for arms). In fact the writers have gone out of their way to falsify history in order to fit the Spartans into modern ideas of masculinity. Leonidas, for example, mocks the Athenians as "boy lovers" despite the fact that the Spartans practiced homosexuality as part of official military policy. Xerxes is depicted with decidedly homo-erotic overtones, and his overtures to Leonidas have a sexual nature. The film seems to be saying that no greater evil could befall Leonidas and holding him up for praise for resisting. When you put these 2 scenes together it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the film exploits fear and hatred of homosexual people. For personal reasons I find this reprehensible, and for aesthetic reasons I find this cheap. If you take the film seriously (and it seems to take itself seriously, being totally without humor), it is almost an advertisement for fascism  the heroes of this movie serve with the understanding that the individual exists for the service of the state, not the state to serve the citizen. By mocking the Athenians and deliberately marginalizing their role in the Peloponnesian War (which the original film showed more accurately to Herodotus' account) this film purports to show heroes who stand up for "freedom" and "reason" while embracing a culture where the vast majority were slaves and where even "free" men existed only to service the State. This is compounded by the treatment of the Thespians, who in the film are shown retreating in fear whereas to my knowledge twice as many Thespians died as Spartans. Only by including the Athenians and other Greeks would we get a valid picture of who the Spartans were and what role they filled in Greek culture. Instead in this film we have this simple-minded portrayal of the Spartans as the only worthwhile Grecians, and therefore an implication that fascist states are superior to easily corrupted democracies and that warriors are inherently superior to politicians or philosophers.