The Critic and the Geek

Rating: 7/10 (22 April 2007)

Every film is made for a reason. Some films are made to entertain, others to educate. I'm sure Zack Snyder (the excellent Dawn of the Dead remake) had one thing on his mind when he was making 300; create the most faithful comic book movie yet. Sin City, another film based on a Frank Miller comic book that was shot using bluescreens, was criticized for being "style over substance". 300 takes that concept to the next level. In 300, the style is the substance. The film is a shot-for-shot adaptation of the comic book. In fact, some shots are lifted directly from the graphic novel (the scene where the Spartans push their enemies off a cliff comes to mind). Needless to say, the film, which tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae between 300 Spartans and (estimated) 1 million Persians, is extremely beautiful to look at. Imagine visiting Le Louvre and you're pretty close. Every single frame is like a painting.
Some people have been talking about how the action genre is dead. 300 proves them wrong. Basically, the second half is one massive fight, with limbs flying, heads spinning, and blood splattering across the frame. As you might expect, the film is pretty violent, so if you're a parent, you might want to leave the kids at home. Snyder shines in those action scenes. He has a lot of tricks up his sleeve. Slow mos, fast forwarding, zooming, and rapid-fire cuts are all used to perfection. And hats off to whoever choreographed the fights. They were poetic.
With the visuals being at the top of the filmmakers' agenda, characterization had to take a back seat. All the characters are either black (evil) or white (good), with no shades of grey whatsoever (believe it or not, the most complex character is Ephialtes the hunchback, who has about 5 minutes of screen time). Take Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler, in a decent performance) and his army for instance. They spend their whole screen time kicking butts, delivering big speeches and uttering cool lines. OK, so they're fearless and heroic. What else do we know about them? Zip. None. We barely know them, so they don't earn our sympathy. Remember how you were emotionally invested in characters like William Wallace (Braveheart) and Maximus (Gladiator)? I'm fairly confident you won't feel the same way here. Also in some scenes, the film was way too weird for its own good. I mean, I doubt we'll be seeing a man-goat rocking out in any other film this year.
I really don't know how to grade 300. The geek in me, who has seen the film 3 times so far and has a giant 300 poster hanging down his wall, wants to give it a 10. On the other hand, the "critic", who rates films based on plot and characters and whatnot, wants to give it 4 or something. So, I guess my grade should be somewhere in between