Messy, ugly & ultimately pointless

Rating: 3/10 (19 July 2018)

While 300's concept of the famous historical final stand of the greeks against the Persians might be an interesting premise, the actual cinematic quality of the picture itself is quite low.
It is admirable how the film approaches masculinity in this modern age, because its main characters ( Especially Leonidas ) are not to be trifled with and are shown to be nobody's plaything. However, the constant shots of these precisely trained sixpack abs starts to become quite ridiculous, as if we were watching a couple of fitness freaks hit the gym instead of acting in a movie. There is no real story or character development, and we are not even given a backstory about the Greeks & the Persians and why they are enemies or what they stand for, other than that Xerxes is a 'Tyrant', but that cliché is just lazy writing. Leonidas decides to march against the thousands of Persians with just 300 men, and no real reason is given for this weird course of action.
While Gerard Butler is somewhat charismatic, he is completely miscast as Leonidas, as his mannerisms are seemingly much too modern. Take his first conversation with Xerxes for example, and his weird 'Unable to knee' excuse. Michael Fassbender and David Wenham are also great actors in the cast, but are not given the chance to shine due to the fact that this movie doesn't seem to have a plot.
The cinematographer, Larry Fong, creates this weird grainy kind of visual look for the picture, and constantly uses artificial backdrops and artificial lighting in order to visualize his scenes. His cinematography doesn't use color variation. It is just one bland mess of white, grey & black, which makes me wonder why it is filmed in color at all, because it isn't being used. It's obvious it is a poor attempt at being original, but every shot is just so ugly and artificial that it becomes a poor joke to look at, and this is not just the case in a single scene but in EVERY SINGLE ONE. Even one indoor scene with Leonidas's wife being accused of something by Theron has the weirdest and unnatural kind of lighting ever seen in film. The result is the visuals of this film are extremely artificial, plastic & fake looking, and nowhere in the picture does this make me believe that what is happening here feels like an actual world. Instead, it feels mostly cartoonish in its visuals.
There is no character development to speak of, since every character remains the same. I don't think there is a single character that has clearly defined characteristics other than most of the male's masculinity, so there is really no one to care about, since we know nothing of the characters and since we are not given the feeling that they could be real. Snyder's direction is highly stylized but once again has little substance in the end. Slow motion is generally a great tool to use in creating suspense before something happens or as a kind of 'Reflection' for a character so we can better sense their inner struggles at a certain point. However, the use of slow motion in 300 is completely pointless, as it is used in the battles themselves in an on and off kind of way, which no doubt looks very 'cool' to most milennials, but in the end does not serve a purpose. There is a lot of blood in these scenes, most of which looks extremely fake and cartoon like.
Ultimately this means that 300 is a mess. There is no character development, no lore or backstory, no real narrative structure, poor writing with mostly mediocre dialogue, actors who are not used to the best of their abilities, no morality or metaphors, and all the while this is accompanied by the most abyssmal looking artificial cinematography, as if we were watching some kind of kids cartoon.