A Welcome Break from the Post-Modern

Rating: 10/10 (11 March 2007)

These days everybody is used to seeing very sketchy films where nobody really knows who the good guys are or who the bad guys are. The audience of these films are left to wonder and think about how many flaws are we willing to accept to see a character as "good" or "bad". "300" breaks from this style and goes back to the olden days of film where everything was pretty much black and white. Now, some people might see this as hindering to the film's effect but it doesn't. In this day and age we need more heroes to look up to that have extremist but absolute and uncompromising without blinking. Of course its not reality. Anyone who knew what kind of graphic novel this was based on should have been aware of that going into the theater. The world doesn't need reality in all of its films. We need a modern myth, and "300" provides this, surely not on the scale of the original "Star Wars" but still epic in its own right. I'm not saying that commentary films aren't as good, but we've been overloaded with that variety for the past decade. Finding a balance so one could go into a theater, watch a film and think about what's wrong with society, then go into another and come out thinking what we can look up to and hope for as a people is what's most important. And in an era where most films depict anti-heroes and even glorify villains, showing some good old black and white good vs evil story is refreshing.