| | The last movie inspired by a Frank Miller graphic novel, Sin City (see entry 14), was awesome, and, a Frank Miller fan myself since his days on Daredevil at Marvel comics, I was looking forward to "300," especially since seeing the lush pictures and preview footage.
The movie uses heavy digital compositing and filtering in every frame to achieve a weighty, antique feel, with thick atmospheric depth, craggy rocky shadows, ruddy skin tones, and gleaming bronze shields. The three hundred Spartan warriors, the heroes of the story, making their valiant stand against the massive Persian army of Xerxes in a narrow mountain pass, look pretty darn ripped under all this effects work. I dunno if actual Spartans went quite so much for the leather-thong-and-nothing-else look in battle, but hey, I can give them the benefit of the doubt on that.
They also make very frequent use of slow-motion, including going from slow to fast to low within a single shot. This highlights some--or actually almost all--of the really quite well done spear and swordplay scenes. It's effective...but would have been more effective in moderation, I think. When pretty much every action sequence is in slow-motion, you start to feel that things are going a little...slowly. Seriously, this two plus hour movie might have been something around half an hour if it all played back at normal speed. Well okay, maybe forty-five minutes.
I think the problem is that they really didn't have much of a story. Yes, they have the generally historically (or rather, according to antique Greek historians) accurate account of the three-hundred Spartans holding off Xerxes' immense army in the pass. But that's about all they have. They try to spin off various hooks and subplots, like the Spartans fighting for "freedom" against the Persian "slavery" (my Classics major friend pointed out that this was all poppycock, considering that Spartan society was based on the labor of a slave class), and the Spartan queen struggling to get military support for her husband's intrepid band from the corrupt Spartan council, and a tortured hunchback who plays a tricky role, and the pleasure-addicted, apparently eight-foot-tall Xerxes having some sort of personal problem with Spartan refusal to cooperate. Oh, and a Spartan captain being concerned about his son.
The thing is, none of these are handled very well. The writing is pretty bad, and it doesn't help that many of the Spartans--who often don't look the least bit Greek--shift in and out of various British accents. For musclebound dudes, I guess they act pretty well, but still, the accent thing could have been worked on.
The writing, though, is crippling. It's hard to feel a whole lot of concern for these Spartans when their king is mouthing stupid quips and nonchalantly chowing down on an apple while his men finish off wounded Persians left behind on the field of battle right in front of the camera (oh yeah, this movie is gory, although strangely enough, no matter how much blood flies out across the screen at each slow-mo sword thrust, none of it seems to collect on the basically naked Spartans). The characterization isn't consistent from scene to scene; it's like on the one hand they want the Spartan king to be this classic noble figure, while on the other hand they want to show that he's down to earth, hip, and rascally.
So they probably knew that the writing was their weak point, and spent a lot of the movie just on close-up battle scenes. This wasn't a bad way to go, but since we don't care about most of the characters, it gets a bit dull, no matter how many freaks the Persian army has to throw at them (seriously, what's with the chained-up giant guy?--not to mention the grotesque blob of an executioner with weird blades for forearms). It would have been nice if we had at least been able to watch logical battle strategy play out, but after a promising beginning where we see just how a phalanx formation of interlocked shields, alternating between blocking and deadly spear thrusts, could be a nigh-unstoppable force when perfectly coordinates, the Spartans break ranks, and the director settles for clip after clip of individual action scenes of whirling swords, greased-up Spartans, lots of dust, and clumsy Persians.
And the end is awful. The side plots are all swiftly wrapped up in offhand fashion, and then the main plot ends in a baffling way that doesn't seem to fit with everything that had led up to that point.
Oh, one other thing. All of the characters seem inordinately concerned with how history will view them. Gee, this wouldn't be because we're viewing this from a historical vantage point, would it? How often do we really think that people involved in a life-and-death, present and real situation sit around harping about the importance of how history will record them? But it seems that the writers really didn't have many other ideas of things for the characters to talk about. |
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