'300' is a lucky number

Rating: 8/10 (19 March 2007)

"This is MADNESS!" shouts a crony who looks suspiciously like Djimon Honsou."Madness?" says King Leonidas (a hearty Gerard Butler) "This is SPARTA!!" At this point, encouraged by his wife Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey,who steals the film from her male co-stars, Leonidas shoves the crony, along with a handful of other low-level baddies, into a huge, deep well to the thundering tune of heavy-metal music. OK, so in the course of history, that probably didn't happen. But wouldn't it be cooler if it did? That's the approach '300' takes, and, in this case, it works. Taken from a comic book by Frank Miller, who puts the "graphic" in "graphic novel", 300 is the tale of 300 Spartans who attempt to defend their land from 250,000 Persians. Sure, you've heard the against all odds story, but not like this, From the opening scene, which shows a young Leonidas battling a wolf in a narrow cave, I knew this movie would be unlike any other. The look of the film is indescribable, a delicious mix of CGI and real location in a way that they have never been mixed before. Every scene holds hundreds of visual wonders. This is without a doubt the best looking film in modern history. However, '300' is not without it's flaws. A subplot about a weak hunchback (Andrew Tiernan) who is spurned by Leonidas falls flat. The leader of the Persian Army, an effeminate and self-aggrandizing warlord named Xerxes, is played by a miscast Rodrigo Santoro, whose voice is artificially (and obviously) deepened. And the speechifying is just plain awful ("Eat your breakfast, Spartans. For tonight, we dine in hell!"). But Director Zack Snyder, his small troupe of actors, and his army of post-production whiz-kids have accomplished a visual miracle like no other before it. '300' heralds the arrival of a strange and wonderful new kind of film-making.