300: Over Indulging Your Brain's Sweet Tooth
A man of considerable breadth stands on the edge of a cliff, the remnants of those sacrificed for genetic cleansing at its base, and inspects a newborn Spartan for adequate size and health. In this manner, all children of Sparta are granted passage into the kingdom shortly after their birth. In the same way, we are welcomed into Frank Miller's vision of Sparta and the world he has created for our entertainment.
I admit I've never so much as opened a Frank Miller graphic novel, but after watching Sin City two years ago and 300 yesterday, I think I have a pretty good idea about how his fair tastes. The focus of these films is not to commercialize the stories that Miller writes for the screen, but rather to faitfully adapt the visual spectacle to moving pictures. The result is an intense, explicit, sometimes disorienting pageant of ocular decadence.
And it is surely that. I had the good fortune of seeing 300 in an IMAX theatre. Watching this movie in that environment was like indulging in 45 pounds of chocolate pudding. My eyes and ears were treated to sensations unspeakable; only matched by the headache my over-stimulated brain punished me with afterward.
The inspection of King Leonidas at cliff's edge initiates his biography. The bio acts as a prologue for the story and paints every Spartan soldier as a formidable opponent engineered from birth. I say "paints" because, unlike the cartoonish nature of Sin City, every frame of this film has the feeling of a High Renaissance fresco. Upon vanquishing a Goliathean wolf thanks to a "heightened sense of things", Leonidas returns to Greece having completed his coming of age trials. It is in the same courtyard where the young Leonidas was trained that we are introduced to Leonidas the protagonist, played by the obviously Scottish Gerard Butler.
Butler's performance fits nicely into the movie. Every movement and line is big and delivered with poignancy. Perhaps this was the preferred method of inspiration and communication on the battlefield in Sparta, but in this context it eventually becomes trite.
And it is that tritness that initially gets the Spartans into a bind. Leonidas's cold reception of a Persian scout (read: he booted him into a bottomless pit) provokes Xerxes and his Persian empire into war. Unable to get a blessing from Sparta's elders, Leonidas is unable to make a suitable war against the Persians. So he bands together a small, expeditionary force and travels north to the narrow pass at Thermopylae. Here, the 300 make their stand against the Persians.
And a subtle stand it most certainly isn't.
Leonidas taunts Xerxes in their first meeting in the most entertaining dialogue of the movie. Xerxes responds in a deceptively low, god-like voice that clues you in as to why men would worship mortals. Again, there is not much subtlety here.
But no one should be seeing this movie for the subtlety. 300 is all about Director Zack Snyder and Art Director Isabelle Guay(The Fountain, The Jacket). Each and every picture of Frank Miller's novel (I gather) is portrayed in slow motion. For the logically disinclined, this means that nearly half the movie is done in slow motion. In any other film, this would never work. I would surmise that one could develop a tumor from this sort of overexposure to slow-mo. But, in staying faithful to the graphic novel format, Snyder uses the slower framerates to make sure every member of the audience sees exactly what Frank Miller would have them see, and in that end the slow motion works uncommonly well.
In the vein of Gladiator and the afformentioned Sin City, the entire movie is shot against a blue screen. Again, this would never work if the aim was to give a realistic account of the Battle of Thermompylae, but the CGI in this movie gives every scene the feeling that it was drawn and not shot in live action. Still, there are some landscapes that might have been better served with on-location shooting, but I hear it's difficult to get to ancient Sparta these days.
In the end, the movie is a mild success. It makes no political statements despite the backdrop of war and the squabbling over the nation's self defense. The modesty-challenged Queen Gorgo (played by the bountiful Lena Headely) makes a speech to the senate in the only real departure from paegentry throughout the film. If she had said anything of particular eloquence (despite the immediate words of the traitorous senator, Theron), then perhaps this scene would have had some power. As it stands, Jimmy Stewart will have to go on looking for a successor. One could argue that it is a pro-Iraq film just as easily as not. But there is nothing about 300 that should be overly analyzed. It is a work of pure visual beauty, and should not be lowered or raised to any other undeserved standard.
Tschüs!