Untitled Document
300 Running time 1:57 Rated R ShowPlace West, ShowPlace East
To be sure, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank
Miller’s classic graphic novel 300 is aimed at one audience and one audience only: young men
between the ages of 16 and 23. Snyder knows what his audience wants, and he
doesn’t disappoint: This film is filled with gory, stylized violence;
women who are seen as little more than sex objects; and a plot that’s
as simple as a bologna sandwich. Lawrence of
Arabia this ain’t, but 300 is a grand visual spectacle
that’s worth taking in, if you have the stomach for it. Miller’s work was a simplified recounting of the
famous Battle of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartan soldiers held off a
vastly greater number of Persian soldiers. Because the battle is said
to have taken place sometime around 480 B.C., it’s impossible to
distinguish at this point how much of what we know about this event is hard
fact or glorified fiction. Suffice it to say, the story of brave King
Leonidas (Gerard Butler), who leads his small army against an invading
horde led by the great Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), holds few surprises. The greatest flaw in Miller’s work has been the
predictability of the plots he hangs his visuals on. The greatest
difficulty demonstrated by Snyder and director Robert Rodriguez, who
adapted Miller’s Sin City, is adhering to these simplistic narratives. But there’s no question that the director has
fashioned a film that’s nearly impossible to look away from.
Flattening the color palette but giving it a high sheen as well, Snyder has
used a rear-projection method, creating a pseudo-3-D effect in which the
images of these ripped warriors straining, sweating, gouging, and bleeding
jump off the screen. Couple this technique with artistically framed
compositions, and you have a film that art lovers will appreciate. Too bad
they’re likely to be turned off by the teen-boy sensibility that
undercuts the hifalutin pictures.
This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2007.
