Review: "300"

I had a sneaking suspicion the new film "300" wouldn’t work for me, but since I had this blasted itch to see something new (despite ever rising theater prices) I took the plunge.

Unfortunately, my feelings were dead on.

Movies like "Letters From Iwo Jima" reflect the contemporary belief that any war movie worth its salt must capture the horror of armed combat.

"300," on the other hand, believes it's enough to capture the fun of watching a war movie on a weekend afternoon. Set to stylized action and crunching guitar riffs, the film is cartoonish and as subtle as a spear thrust to the head.

Based on the well-received comic book miniseries from "Sin City" creator Frank Miller, this would-be historical epic is loaded with wall-to-wall graphic violence and gore (swordfire, arrowfire, slashings, stabbings, beheadings, creature attacks and explosive mayhem), male and female nudity, simulated sex and some sexual violence, and some sexually suggestive talk and humor. It’s a faithful-to-a-fault adaptation that recreates specific panels from the comic. How this R rated film avoids NC-17 is anyone’s guess. A thin plot, puffed up dialogue, and underdeveloped characters do nothing to leaven the film’s long battle scenes. The fighting makes up almost half the film’s 144 minutes.

The film is based on the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartan warriors died almost to the last man to delay an invading Persian army of millions (these events also inspired a 1962 movie version, "The 300 Spartans").

Scottish actor Gerard Butler ("Phantom of the Opera") stars here as Leonidas, the king who led the Spartan defense. In this version of events, his numbers were reduced because Sparta’s ephors, sacred priests, and key politicians taking Persian gold declared a sacred holiday to hamstring the army from mobilizing. So with hand-picked troops serving as his personal guard, Leonidas takes a "stroll" to northern Greece. There he joins with fearful Greek allies to block key mountain paths and funnel the Persians into a narrow pass dubbed the "Hot Gates," where the defenders can face a few hundred by dribs and drabs.

The Persian king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, Brazil’s "Tom Cruise" cum "Lost" TV actor) sends wave after wave of soldiers at the determined Spartans. Leonidas and his comrades slaughter thousands, but can't hold the line forever. Back home, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) hopes to rally the full Spartan army. The duplicitous councilman Theron (an oily Dominic West) clearly implies that the price of his support is her.

But after taking payment, Theron reneges on his deal. The queen collects with interest, though, when she plunges a sword into his stomach. A handy purse loaded with Persian Darics, or gold coins, then spills to the ground, exposing Persian duplicity in the Spartans’ midst. By this time, it’s too late as Leonidas and his band finally fall to Xerxes’ minions.

Unlike the earlier, sedate by comparison 1962 film, which got most of the history right, "300" obsesses with giving the Spartans credit for every Persian slain at Thermopylae. So much so it misses their true noble sacrifice, that once Xerxes outflanked them, the 300 Spartans (as well as 700 Thespian soldiers) remained on the battlefield to cover the retreat of the rest of the Greek army.

This Alamo-like sacrifice unites Greece against Persia the following year at the plain of Platea, where Dilios finishes his story of Leonidas’ stand and leads the charge against the dread Persian hordes.

Co-writer/director Zack Snyder ("Dawn of the Dead") borrows the computer-crafted look of "Sin City." The fakery makes the stupendous slaughter digestible, and the wholesale dismemberment and blood-squirting can be done digitally, with "Matrix"-style acrobatics.

The fanciful depiction of the horrific battle also allows Snyder to integrate fantasy elements - the Spartans battle a giant ogre, and there's another creature with crab-claw hands who executes ineffective generals at the whim of Xerxes, who himself looks like a seven-foot-tall Dennis Rodman after a shopping/piercing spree.

The cinematography lacks the rugged vitality, and the dynamism, of Miller's drawings, though. Miller's "300" pictures leap off the page; on the movie screen, they roll over and play dead. The film has a poreless, waxen quality, as if all sensuality had been airbrushed out of it: the Spartans glow, while the Persians gleam darkly. The actors struggle valiantly to take hold of their characters, but deep down they know they've donated their bodies, and their faces, to science.

The film owes a debt to "Gladiator" as well as the "Lord of the Rings" movies. "Rings" co-star David Wenham appears here, narrating a few segments as Dilios, a one-eyed survivor of the Spartans’ stand.

Butler's blustery performance was clearly inspired by Russell Crowe, though it has none of Crowe's subtlety.

There's something to be said for a movie that pauses amid an orgy of violence to show us an actual orgy - Xerxes' tent houses a harem of naked, squirming bisexual slave girls, a few of whom are amputees. The movie, obsessed with machismo, seems to suggest that the Persians need to be stopped because they are sexually ambiguous. Ironic since the washboard-abbed Spartans in their scarlet cloaks and brown loincloths look ready to break into a chorus of "YMCA" any second.

Clearly, this isn’t "Letters From Iwo Jima." "300" makes no bones about embracing the glory of war (or the glory of a comic strip based on a movie about a war), and romanticizing the Spartan warrior culture ("never surrender, " "never retreat," "hope for a beautiful death") that entranced Miller as a boy.

Miller chose well with Thermopylae . It’s a cinema-ready event that produced dialogue that no dramatist could improve, recorded by Herodotus and repeated here. "Come back with your shield, or on it," says Gorgo to Leonidas. When Xerxes asks the Spartans to lay down their arms, Leonidas says, "Come and get 'em." And when a Persian general brags "Our arrows will blot out the sun, " a Spartan answers "Then we will fight in the shade."

Along the way, "300" does give us a sense of why Thermopylae is considered pivotal to history. It casts the Spartans as defenders of Western civilization (freedom and self-rule and "reason") against Xerxes, a self-proclaimed man-god supported by slave armies who fought with whips at their backs. The Spartans had slaves, but did their own fighting.

Generally unknown to most people is that in the following century, the Spartans went on to establish an empire of their own—and fail miserably. A bastion of democracy and freedom indeed. Also left out is the fact that prior to the Persian invasion of Greece, Athens and Sparta had tried to incite uprisings among several of Persia’s neighboring subject peoples. Freedom to the ancient Greeks equaled freedom to aggrandize themselves. The Spartans were oligarchs, while the Athenians were democrats. Athenian democracy was for Athenians, though, not other Greeks much less foreigners.

Here's an article that goes over how well "300" matches up with history.


"300" has caused a stir in Europe, where debate has begun on whether the film is an apologia for Bush's Iraq adventure or an apologia for anti-occupation suicide missions.

I’ll go out on a limb and guess this won’t matter much to Millers' fans. They're concerned with more important things, like how to disable and defeat an ogre by first cutting his hamstring, then stabbing him in the eye and slicing him open at the neck.