one of the most elaborate, yet shallow exercises in 21st century epic style you'll see this year

Rating: 7/10 (14 March 2007)

300 comes way of Frank Miller, the ultra-famed comic book artist and author (behind the neo-noir Sin City), and Zack Snyder, who brought us the remake of Dawn of the Dead (not a shame nor not a necessity from the original), and it's what movie audiences probably salivate for when it comes to action epics from a time period dozens of centuries ago. But because it's Frank Miller, and he's never one to skimp on being garish, gory and a tad shallow with his take on certain topics, be they 40s pulp-fiction clichés or Batman or a Spartan battle like here, it's the farthest thing from naturalism. Snyder knows this, and decides to go for broke, albeit extremely faithful to the source material (and I say this having not read this graphic novel but having read other Miller works), and it becomes another case of a comic-book getting pumped up like some kind of wild cinematic toy, in this case probably with steroids. But to say that it pretty much becomes style over substance would be too easy, because the problems that come up in the film are not just in the substance, but also in what starts to hit the viewer over the head. Not that there aren't a good many memorable, bloody and exciting images that could only come from the f***ed up mind of Miller, but there is still the all-too basic qualities to the substance too.
I know I shouldn't make too much of an issue with something like substance in a film that supposes right away what its audience is: men, more than women (although I wouldn't count them out as fans entirely) into seeing men be MEN, warriors out for the kind of glory that comes with legends. The basic legend for the battle of 300 is that there were about 300 Spartans, led by Leonidas (Gerald Butler), who was the ambitious king who decided to take on the king of Persia, who claimed to be a God, instead of submitting Sparta to the rule of the Persian empire, and with it going through extremely brawny moves to not stop till the last Spartan laid to rest. More or less that, anyway, as Miller throws in certain, or make that extreme, 'peculiarities' with both sides. The Spartans, for example, consult an oracle, who is some girl that contorts around like she's in an emo music video, and there's a deformed hunchback-outcast, who turns on the Spartans and tries to bandwagon with the mega-pierced, sexual-maniacal 'heathens' that are seen as the Persians. The Persians, by the way, may not have the greatest/most blood-thirsty of warriors, but they do have ninjas with masks, and a rhino, a deformed-barbaric homunculus, and a few "clumsy" elephants. Plus, that king/God, who's ultimate shame is that he's proved by his own people to not be a God, I guess, by Leonidas's last throw of a spear.
So, as one might gather, there is a lot of 'things' going on in 300, though as far as stuff with historical pertinence, not so much. There's a fairly predictable and straightforward sub-plot with Leonidas's wife (Lena Heady) back in Sparta having to put up with a traitor in her midsts, though one she succumbs to partially. But for the most part, we're submerged into characters who redefine what it means to be 'one-dimensional', and while the acting is never actually all that bad, even from the usually barking Butler, the words Miller gives them don't do much to make it sound anything more than, well, a comic-book. Which is OK in bits and pieces, until the feeling of being practically detached from reality wears thin, including getting inundated with narration, lifted by Snyder likely from all those narration boxes one sees all the time (and somehow seemed to work better in Sin City) and during some of the BIGGEST dramatic action sequences. It may sound like the substance is a bit too much to bear and that I, as part of the audience, took it all too seriously. This is not exactly the case, really, as the storytelling in and of itself is fairly strong and worthwhile to tell- it's just that not taking it seriously makes it enjoyable in the shallowest ways possible.
This is sort of amped up to 11 by how Snyder puts all of this together technically. It's another stepping stone for the world of combining CGI and live-action, where blood and body parts and heads roll off in a disgustingly enthralling way, and where environments are almost TOO dark &/or lush. There are actually very great images as well, unexpected ones, like when we see some of these walking abstractions of violence and mayhem from the Persians, or some kind of goat-man during the Persian's strange orgy scene. Even the battle scenes, sometimes, are worthy of the best parts of Braveheart and Gladiator. Yet sometimes there is too much, as with the narration, of pushing the boundaries with the style- slow-motion, for example, gets about 3/4 of the attention for all of the battle &/or anything remotely action related in the film, and Snyder's tactic with his DP and editor is to speed up for a moment, then slow down, speed up, slow down, over and over during a battle scene. It comes very close to completely abusing the usage of 32fps in action, for no good reason no less.
All this aside, I'm still glad I saw 300, at least the one time on a gigantic IMAX screen where the contorted camera angles, machismo-rousing moments, and the epic sweep of a production done in such a weird way made it a fun, gory trip. And yet, it doesn't inspire to go back to it more than once, and its pleasures, however in a guilty way (I couldn't help but getting a kick out of the dead-pan manner of some shots and exchanges between the characters), are brief and not very lasting.