Review of 300

Fiancee and I had both wanted to see this, so we picked it up at Blockbuster yesterday. As it started, I decided that it was likely to be either very good or very bad.

It didn't take long for me to settle on the latter. Director Zack Snyder seems to have retained a high-schoolish sense of what makes a good movie: packs lots of cool effects between cliched-yet-badass catch phrases, pepper liberally with sex and gory battle, throw some guitar into the soundtrack, and flavor throughout with the sort of black and white moral thinking that seems so logical to the adolescent mind. Even to call it high schoolish seems unfair, since I'm certain that many of my students have a better idea what makes a good story and a more subtle view of the world. I think its telling that of the 3 awards won and 7 nominations received, the bulk of them come from MTV or the Teen's Choice award, and one of its victories was for its trailer.

It is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, which might cause me to lose a bit of respect for the venerable Miller if I didn't know the track record of the film industry. As it is, I'll have to reserve judgment until I read the graphic novel (which will probably happen on the 20th of Never). The best that can be said, I suppose, is that it retains something of a comic-book feel, though I would mean that more positively when talking about, say, Sin City (also by Miller, btw) than I do here. 

The sad thing is that, unless the wikipedia article was written by someone who'd only seen the film, it really seems to have followed events as they were recorded fairly closely. The oracle is distorted quite a bit to make religion and tradition bad guys in the film, the politics in Sparta and between Sparta and the rest of Greece are grossly oversimplified, and some other liberties are taken, but it's probably closer to the original than, say, Troy was to The Iliad. For me, at least (and I know many people disagree), Troy worked far better--not as a movie faithful to its sources, but on its own, giving us characters to care about and a picture of the world that's a bit more nuanced, while still having plenty of action.

300, at times, doesn't even hold together on its own terms. The big deal in Leonides' plan is that his forces (btw, historically there were about 900 "servants" with them who also fought, not to mentioned a vastly larger force of Thespians than what's depicted) can hold off the vastly larger force by holing up in a mountain pass where Xerxes' superior numbers can't be used to overwhelm the Greeks, and this plus the phalanx of overlapping shields is made a big deal of, but then after the initial skirmish, they seem to be fighting in a big open plain and no longer taking any advantage of their interlocking shields. Lots of little things nagged at me too. I'm no expert in this, but I tend to be skeptical of bronze-age swords that can decapitate someone or sever limbs with a single blow. I think those Greeks smuggled in some steel from the Greek city-state of Anachronism. Spears that never break (unless someone is intentionally snapping one for effect) or get stuck were evidently another reason the Spartans did so well, though it's frankly amazing that the Greeks could hold out so long against what seemed to be a Persian longbow to top the famed British longbow of latter days--evidently the Anachrians were playing both sides in this war.

Anyway, those are niggling things.  When you don't like a film, every little thing is going to bother you, I suppose. I found myself wishing that the film hadn't used so much slow-motion, not only because the effect lost its coolness from overuse, but because the 117 minute film could have been done in 70 if everything had flowed in real-time. Yeah, there was just that much slow-motion.

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