How can you not get excited for a movie about 300 well-oiled and buffed men in red Speedos fending off thousands of other men with naught but their big, steely swords? Ok, don't answer that. In fact, I suggest you stop thinking all together, temporarily revert back to Cro-Magnon mode, and then go see Frank Miller's latest adapted graphic novel, 300.
Not to say that the movie is stupid. Rather the themes, characters and action all resonate on basic levels. To borrow a tired comparison, it's like a rollercoaster. The craftsmanship is complex, but the thrill itself is something simple.
Take the plot. All you really need to know is a contingent of 300 Spartans who are really, really good at fighting defend against a conquering Persian army with hundreds to thousands of times as many men. There's some light political intrigue and Spartan cultural exposition on the side, but it's basically all gravy. The real draw here is in the visuals, the fighting and the big bearded dude who yells tough things.
Like Sin City, 300 is shot almost entirely with green screen. This allows the film to drop its live-action characters into a highly stylized, nearly cartoonish setting. The film also plays a lot with color, opting for various bronze and silver washes. The visual fiddling results in images that pop, often as if they were lifted straight from Miller's original work (and many undoubtedly were).
But the film doesn't rest purely on pretty shot compositions. It also has some of the most impressive fight choreography and dismemberments I've ever seen -- and I've seen a lot of movie dismemberment. Director Zack Snyder, the man behind the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, knows how to believably cleave some arms, legs and heads.
Still more impressive is the Spartan swordplay. Not only do the Spartans look cool and move like real killing machines, but Snyder employs a unique three-camera setup during fight scenes that allows him to seamlessly transition from long to medium and close shots. The result is a camera that can push in to focus on a particular sword stroke and then fly back out to reveal widespread slaughter without ever breaking the single long take. These may seem like fairly childish things to praise a movie for, but if big, seamless battle scenes and dramatic body part removal aren't your cup of tea, 300 probably isn't for you.
As for the acting and writing, it's all as over-the-top as the action. Gerard Butler (the Spartan king Leonidas) screams every one of his shamelessly macho lines to the point of near head combustion. Rodrigo Santora (The Persian emperor Xerxes), whose character is a self-described God, is presented as 10 feet tall with a supernaturally deep voice on perma-echo.
Some may attack 300 as "too much," (duh); others may even go so far as to call it right wing propaganda (noble, freedom-mongering soldiers just waiting for a troupe surge). Then again, with its self-sacrificing warriors battling an impossibly large, rich and invading army monolith, you could just as easilly compare it to certain other moder militant goups. I'll leave the political emblemizing to those pretentious enough to think the movie actually needs it -- check rottentomatoes.com for some particularly amusing examples of this.
300 falls somewhere between period drama, Greek mythology and an episode of WWE RAW. It's impossibly agrandizing and has historical inaccuracies that may make Herodotus twitch in his grave (I don't think Xerxes employed worm-men with knife hands). But it's really all in the spirit of things. Technical aspects aside, 300 doesn't really need to be scrutinized. Just look at all the eye candy (or man candy, depending what you're into) and enjoy.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
