An adaptation too faithful to make a great movie - but it was OK

Rating: 9/10 (3 April 2007)

I am a comic collector, and I'm not really a big Frank Miller fan. I love his Daredevil from the early '80s, but I haven't really liked anything of his since then. I read '300' when I was visiting a friend a couple of years ago, but I didn't think it was much good. I'm no fan of Miller's ideas about violence and manhood; it all seems a bit sadistic and, well, black and white. Miller acknowledges this; he has said that he is an artist (i.e. a "drawer") at heart, so he draws what he likes to draw, and then just makes up some story to go with it. Fair enough - that's his business. He can do as he likes. And apparently a lot of people like it. I'm just not one of them.
I did go to see the movie, however - as a comic collector, going to see comics-based movies kind of comes with the territory. I expected something pretty entertaining, at least visually, since the trailers looked amazing. The adaptation had translated the special comic book style into a special, but different, motion picture style, and I was interested in seeing how well this was done. Again, the trailers were extremely promising.
The movie was fairly entertaining, but I must say I am disappointed. The story just didn't grab me very much; there wasn't much character development (every Spartan except Leonidas and his captain were practically completely faceless and anonymous) or interesting elements to identify with or engage oneself in. The pacing suffered a lot from the constant slow-motion scenes which I felt comprised a much too great desire on the part of the director to mimic the exact comic-book panels, even to the degree of punctuating the action and the narrative flow of the movie's story. So I would call this a too faithful adaptation of the comic.
I also thought the story had more general problems. The style and the basic concept were enormously promising, but I didn't feel they lived up to that promise at all. The movie could have been so much more effective in terms of action, excitement, intensity, human spirit and climax. Sure, there were a few cool things, and Gerard Butler himself (incl. his cool Scottish accent) was very good. But both the substance of the story and the overall pacing and storytelling were just not good enough to draw me into the story and make me feel anything for it. Stylistically, as a first effort and an experiment, it was OK. It was fairly entertaining and visually interesting. But it could have been so much more.
Oh well, we can't have everything.
7 out of 10.