117 Minutes, Color, USA, 2007

Written By: Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad & Michael Gordon (based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller)

Directed By: Zack Snyder

Dramatis Personae:

Gerard Butler is Leonidas, King of Sparta, leader of the Three Hundred and manliest man ever to live.

Lena Headey is Gorgo, Leonidas’s formidable wife and queen.

Michael Fassbender is Stelios, insane and romantic Spartan warrior.

David Wenham is Dilios, Spartan bard commissioned by Leonidas to tell their story.

Vincent Regan is Artemis, grizzled veteran and Leonidas’s second-in-command.

Tom Wisdom is Astinos, Artemis’s son and lieutenant.

Andrew Tiernan is Ephialtes, deformed Spartan wannabe and traitor.

Dominic West is Theron, sleazy Spartan politician opposed to Leonidas and lusting after Gorgo.

Andrew Plavin is Daxos, leader of the Thespian contingent and reluctant ally to the Spartans.

Rodrigo Santoro is Xerxes, God-King of the Persian Empire.

Commentary:

It is one of the oldest and most inspiring true stories of valor and courage. In 480 BC, the Persian Empire invaded Greece. The loose alliance of Greek city-states were unable to respond quickly, so it fell to the two most powerful individual states, Sparta and Athens, to lead the defense. The Persians rolled, unstoppable, through northern Greece, until they reached the narrow mountain pass of Thermopylae. There they faced a small force of highly-trained Greek warriors, led by three hundred Spartan elite. Using both their skills and the rocky terrain, the Greeks held off the numerically superior Persian forces for three days. Although they were eventually overwhelmed and slaughtered to the last man, they bought enough time for the Athenians to rally the remaining city-states to unite and ultimately repel the Persians. It is a story that has inspired for thousands of years, a story of quiet courage and determination in the face of incredible odds, a story of men armed with skill and guile fending off the hordes of darkness, assured that right was on their side, and death in service to that ideal was the noblest thing imaginable.

Re-imagined through the artwork of Frank Miller and the direction of Zack Snyder, the story of the Battle of Thermopylae takes on a different air. 300 is a supercharged, super-stylized, super-violent take on the legend. Visually stunning, like nothing ever before seen on screen, it’s a hell of a good ride. But while it’s visually spectacular, it lacks a little bit of soul. But more on that later.

We begin with an abridged version of King Leonidas’s early life (told by a narrator whom we are later to learn is Dilios, courtesy of David Wenham’s marvelous speaking voice), and a brief introduction to how much childhood sucked in ancient Sparta. Inspected carefully for physical defects at birth – and tossed off a cliff if any were found – pressed into brutal military school at age seven, then cast into the wild to fend for themselves at age 13, Spartan boys were bred to be perfect, merciless killing machines, and those who survived to become men were considered the finest soldiers ever known. We see Leonidas going through this process and returning alive to claim his birthright as King. The sight of a sinewy teenage boy returning to the city clad in nothing but the skin of a wolf he killed with his bare hands really makes it clear: in a society of Alpha Males, Leonidas is the most Alpha of them all.

Flash forward to Leonidas as adult, husband, father, and king, facing an international crisis of apocalyptic proportions. The Thousand Nations of the Persian Empire are at the doorstep of Greece, and they bring total annihilation to anyone who stands against them. An emissary from Persia arrives and offers Leonidas a choice: Sparta will submit to the will of Xerxes, or be destroyed and ground into dust. Leonidas replies in a genuinely Spartan way: he tosses the messenger in a well and starts preparing for war.

But there is a snag in Leonidas’s plans: no King of Sparta may declare open war without permission of the gods, and the Persian invasion coincides with a religious festival during which no fighting may take place. Leonidas consults the Oracle, who forbids him to muster the Spartan army (unbeknownst to Leonidas the keepers of the Oracle are in league with the Persians and have rigged the prophecy against him). Following the advice of his wife, who tells him to do “what a Free Man should,” Leonidas marches to Thermopylae alone, accompanied by three hundred volunteers as his “personal bodyguard.” They are joined by a slightly larger force of Thespians, and they dig in at the mountain pass.

That’s the first twenty minutes of the movie. The rest is nonstop violence and carnage, as wave after wave of Persian troops descend on the Greeks, and the Spartans laugh at death and hold their ground. Meanwhile Gorgo wages the war at home, playing politics to try and get the Spartan senate behind her husband before it’s too late.

Holy crap is this movie a ride. There is violence aplenty, and the screen is just awash with testosterone. 300 does not shy away from the sheer brutality of Bronze Age warfare; rather it embraces it with style. Every clash of sword on shield, every thunk of arrows piercing flesh, is presented with loving attention for our pleasure. The film really sells the pure SAVAGERY of its day and age; this is a time and place where life is cheap, where death can come in a thousand different horrible ways, and sometimes the only thing a man can do is hope his death will be swift and will count for something. Zack Snyder’s camerawork has a tendency to get predictable – you could create a drinking game based on how often he presents us with a grisly kill in slow-motion – but for the most part it remains quite effective. Critics have called this movie little more than a video game on screen; I disagree. It does have its flaws, but where it does work it works BRILLIANTLY.

Where it works is in its highly-stylized presentation. This is not meant to be a realistic or historically accurate account of an ancient battle; this is like something out a historian’s acid trip. Our Spartan heroes are stripped-down warriors, with no armor but spear and shield and helmet, preferring the raw brutality of close-quarter combat. The Persian troops that descend on them are varied in dress and fighting style – representative of the wide range of subject peoples of which the Persian Empire composed – and are outlandish and alien-looking compared to the Greeks. Some of them barely look human at all, which must have been how they first appeared to the ancient Greeks. Xerxes, the God-King himself, is quite literally larger than life. A garish androgynous giant, he arrives on a huge ornate throne carried by hundreds of slaves to bargain with Leonidas after the first day of combat, and the contrast between them could not be more obvious. Xerxes, with his exotic piercings, his elaborate jewelry, and his army of servants who offer their backs for him to walk upon lest his godhood be sullied by touching earth. Leonidas, as simply adorned as any one of his soldiers, speaking plainly without innuendo or diplomatic double-talk. In this stylized version of ancient Greece, Xerxes is the ultimate enemy: the man who would enslave the entire world to glorify himself. Leonidas is cast as the simple Free Man who will not kneel. This is the battle of tyranny versus democracy, freedom versus slavery, reason versus cultism, and Leonidas is all that stands in the way.

It’s Gerard Butler’s ridiculously bombastic performance that is the centerpiece of the film. He’s like something out of a bygone age of historical epics, bellowing his lines with a gusto not seen since Charlton Heston’s glory days. In any other movie, this level of ACT-ing! would just not work, but here it fits quite nicely. His Leonidas is a lion, savage and noble, confident in his own strength and the righteousness of his cause to the point of arrogance. He is such an impressive specimen of masculinity and such an efficient killing machine that his arrogance is thoroughly justified. Butler spends most of the movie ROARING his lines, but in this movie there just seems to be no other logical way to deliver them.

Unfortunately, with Leonidas being the dominant character in the film, the others suffer. The rest of his Spartans are little more than stock characters and war-movie clichés. Artemis is the fiercely loyal veteran, closest thing to a friend Leonidas has. Stelios is the glory-hound, believing fervently that nothing in this life is more important than a romantic death in battle (to the point where the level-headed Daxos wonders if he’s just not frigging insane). Dilios is the intellectual, better at words than fighting and commissioned to use his gifts rather than throw his life away in the final battle. Astinos is the wide-eyed innocent, whose poignant death reminds our heroes that they are not immortal (I don’t think I’m giving anything away here; I mean, it’s in the history books that they DO all die). The only other character as compelling as Leonidas is Gorgo, who proves to be just as formidable as her husband as she holds things together back in Sparta. She is the Spartan ideal of womanhood: a strong woman who will bear strong sons, who is not afraid to speak her mind in the presence of men (Spartan women give birth to Spartan men, after all), and who is willing to sacrifice her personal honor for the sake of the nation. The battle she fights is no less harrowing than Leonidas’s, as she maneuvers between self-interested politicians and corrupt bureaucrats, and her pyrrhic victory is no less satisfying.

And yet, despite the glorious number of severed limbs and displays of martial prowess, substance is lacking. That’s where the movie does fall short. We applaud the Three Hundred for their courage in the face of certain death, but getting behind what they fought FOR is more difficult. The notion is put forth in the film that this is a war between the culture of Greece, land of reason and democracy, and that of Persia, an entire empire of oppressed slaves laboring to glorify a single leader with delusions of divinity. The notion that the Greeks stood as Free Men defending their homelands from those who would enslave them in their own houses. And yet…having the defense of a free society taken up by a culture of fascist nutjobs somehow doesn’t quite work. The high and lofty Greek ideals of democracy and science and philosophy don’t seem to go with a nation that practiced eugenics and cultural brainwashing as a matter of course. Leonidas’s disdain for his Athenian allies as a bunch of intellectual “boy-lovers”, followed by his decision to take himself and his boys up to the front to do Greece’s job for them, leaves one with a vague feeling of discomfort (It’s worth noting that, despite the presence of dozens of strapping young men wearing nothing but loincloths, there is barely a trace of homoeroticism in this film. These men are so macho, so savage, that you can’t possibly find yourself attracted to them). There’s a faint whiff of Realpolitick in the air, as Leonidas and his Three Hundred, products of a civilization that any Free Man would find questionable at best, prove to be the only ones ready and able to defend the Free World.

The film never answers the difficult questions, about the nature of freedom or the hypocrisy of the historically accurate Greeks; indeed it never deliberately poses them. It never tries to be anything other than a spectacle of bloodshed set against the backdrop of one of the greatest displays of heroism in all of human history, and there it succeeds. As a species, perhaps the human race has evolved beyond the point where the best thing one can hope for in life is a meaningful death, and so such sentiments just fill us with unease. But heroism never ceases to inspire. And violence never ceases to entertain. And if 300 fails to deliver on the first front, it certainly succeeds on the other two.

Things To Look For:

- One of the more insane parts of the story is its factual nature. That many of the things said and done in the movie actually DID happen. Or at least, Herodotus said they actually happened, and since Herodotus was a contemporary of Leonidas and the closest thing to a reliable source we have, we can only assume they did. The Persian emissary asks Leonidas for a handful of earth and a flask of water to signify Sparta’s submission; Leonidas throws him in a well and says, “Get them yourself.” A Persian general threatens the Spartans with the promise that they will fire so many arrows at them that they will blot out the sun; Stelios replies, “Then we shall fight in the shade.” A Persian demand to the Spartans to lay down arms is met with the famous response “Come and get them.” The fact that these lines were actually uttered by actual people is mind-boggling. The fact that such ludicrously macho men actually existed – and had the stones to back up their words – is startling. For all its stylization, it’s pretty clear that 300 isn’t really exaggerating a whole lot.

- This film was shot almost entirely on bluescreen, and I think that it works very well given the stylized nature of the film. It points to an ability in the filmmakers to understand when to properly use computer-generated locations and imagery. When trying to create a landscape that no longer exists, or could not possibly exist in the real world, THAT’s when you use bluescreen. It’s not a shortcut for a director too cheap or too lazy to film on location; it’s a tool that must be used properly. And in this film, which takes its art direction from a highly-stylized graphic novel, it’s used properly. Much like Sin City before it, 300 presents us with a world of muted blacks and whites and sepias, with bursts of color (mostly blood-red) and outlandish, almost impressionistic vistas of landscapes and cityscapes. It doesn’t look realistic at all, but then it isn’t MEANT to.

- Gerard Butler’s Scottish accent occasionally creeps into his voice, and I can’t help but wonder if that was intentional. I remember once in a literature class reading a translation of Lysistrata wherein the Spartan characters were all characterized as speaking with Scots brogues. The idea being that the Athenians regarded Spartans the same way the English regarded the Scots: these truculent bumpkinish thugs. Granted, there is something in the Scottish character, a certain enthusiasm, a certain type of physicality, that lends them to being entirely believable as macho, sexy, slightly insane men-of-action, so it might just be a mere coincidence that a Scottish actor was cast as Leonidas. But I still can’t help but wonder if Zack Snyder read the same translation of Lysistrata that I did…

- The Classical Scholar in me was just chewing his own leg off to escape the trap I put him in, begging to start ranting about all the historical inaccuracies to be found. I kept trying to tell him, it’s not MEANT to be accurate. It’s based on a graphic novel that never claimed to be a historical text (and frankly, anyone getting their history lessons from a comic book isn’t worth worrying about). But still…young Leonidas, forced to survive a harsh Spartan winter with nothing but a spear and a loincloth? Come on now. The Spartans weren’t THAT heartless. Dar the Beastmaster wore more clothes than that, for crying out loud! I know, it’s in the graphic novel…back in the trap, you.

Written words (c) 2007-2010 Tim o'Brien. Not to be used without permission. Other content, including images, is intended as a Fair Use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. sec. 107.

Date Posted: March 11^th, 2007

Complaints? Comments? Drop Me A Line!

Home Page

Archive Page