A faithful adaptation of Miller's source material.

Rating: 7/10 (4 September 2007)

Frank Miller has, since the 1980s, been one of the most popular and influential creators in comics, almost his fame culminated in 1986's "The Dark Knight Returns", and his later works have been less successful commercially. Despite Miller's fame, I have never been particularly impressed by his work, even of his supposed magnum opus, the aforementioned "The Dark Knight Returns." From what I have read, the highlight of his career was his early Marvel work on "Daredevil", and everything since then has been fairly downhill, especially after "Sin City", which, while adapted into a very fun film, typifies his work: completely devoid of any real value beyond crude entertainment, with no emotional investment, and obsessed with extreme violence and highly sexualized depictions of female characters.
"300" is post-"Sin City" in Miller's career, and is basically the story of the legendary 300 Spartan warriors, with the usual Miller features: Madonna/whore women (tilted towards the latter), graphic violence, anti-gay humour (despite Spartans being historically homosexual). It's a fun entertainment, but nothing more, and certainly not a great movie. The technical merits are quite impressive (including the abdomens of the Spartan warriors, led by King Leonidas; Gerard Butler's performance has at the very least supplied fodder for innumerable internet parodies; Butler is not bad, let me be clear; he perfectly fits the histrionic, one-dimensional material, and I know him to be a very talented actor in other roles).
This film did well enough to get Zack Snyder the job of directing Alan Moore's "Watchmen", which will be the real test of his skill; he provided a convincing film translation of a one-dimensional story, and now he faces the Holy Grail of all mature, literate comics. We'll see how he does.