Movie Monday - 300

This week sees the DVD release of 300: Rise of An Empire, the sequel to the 2006 hit, 300. That film was based on Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name, which, in turn, was based on The 300 Spartans from 1962. We're not going to go all the way back then, so let's stick with the 2006 version for today's Movie Monday.



Director: Zack Snyder

Writer: Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, Michael Gordon

Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey Dominic West, David Wenham, Michael Fassbender, Rodrigo Santoro

Release: 2006

War is coming to Greece. The Persian empire, under the expansionist ruler Xerxes, is looking westward for more lands to subjugate. Emissaries are sent but Spartans bow to no man and the forces of Xerxes, the greatest army the world has ever seen, march intent on razing all the lands of Greece. But there is still hope. Leonidas, the bravest king of Sparta, takes three hundred of his best warriors to a narrow pass that the armies of Xerxes must negotiate. Here, they will hold back the foreign hordes, no matter the numbers arrayed against them. They do not fear death, for they are Spartans, and will fight with every breath remaining to protect their nation, making the Persians pay for each blood-soaked step they take into Greece.

THE SQUEE

• This film is visually superb. It got a lot of attention (and imitators) at the time for its stylistic use of the fast-slow-fast action scenes that glorified the choreography of the battle sequences. Other films of the time, such as The Bourne Supremacy two years earlier had incredibly fast action sequences, almost too quick to follow beyond a swift blur. 300, on the other hand, revelled in every moment of battle – which is good, because the film is basically just one battle.
• The narrative is epic, appropriate given the inspiration. The use of the unreliable narrator is perfect for this film, given that it's a retelling of a retelling of a retelling. The Spartans are glorious heroes, their actions pure and honourable, making them the saviours of all civilisation – OF COURSE that's what is going to be said, because a Spartan is saying it. At its heart, 300 is a remarkably simple story – an underdog story but one that the underdog was only attempting a stalling tactic. If you want to make the story of how three hundred men died when everyone expected them to die, you have to make them almost super-human. There's a lot of glorifying of the Spartan way of life, which makes sense given the narrator, but the film got a bit of flak for it. If anything, 300 is completely unabashed in its hero worship. It's almost Disney-esque in its desire to re-write history the 'way it should have gone'.

THE SUCK

• So racist. This unfortunately, stems from the source material. Like I mentioned above with the unreliable narrator, the main characters had to be made almost super-human, and one way that was done was by almost completely dehumanising the Persians, making them little more than monsters 'from the East' with bizarre customs (unlike the totally normal and acceptable customs the Spartans have of drugging a young girl to tell the future or murdering babies that don't match their aesthetic ideals). It really is a simple film, just as the graphic novel was a simple story. Unfortunately, that painted the sides very clearly as good and evil and the method used to portray that evil was a great example of how to make something the Other. It didn't help that Persia is modern day Iran, a nation that the United States was not having particularly good relations with at the time. And also the writer of the original graphic novel, Frank Miller, is kind of a racist.

That being said, the visuals are OUTSTANDING. Any Zack Snyder film will have a very striking aesthetic that will shine past everything else it is doing. I do recommend checking out the graphic novel as it is a great look at how to tell a classic 'true' myth – using history to create something larger than anything that could really occur.

300 – 9781569714027 – Frank Miller – 117 pages