300

Director: Zack Snyder
Screenplay: Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon (based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley)
Stars: Gerard Butler (King Leonidas), Lena Headey (Queen Gorgo), Dominic West (Theron), David Wenham (Dilios), Vincent Regan (Captain), Michael Fassbender (Stelios), Tom Wisdom (Astinos), Andrew Pleavin (Daxos), Andrew Tiernan (Ephialtes), Rodrigo Santoro (Xerxes)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2007
Country: U.S.
300
300If Zack Snyder's 300, which tells the ancient story of a tiny army of Spartans fending off hoards of Persian warriors, is about anything, it is about blood spray. While its ideological agenda, which head-scratchingly conflates impassioned rhetoric about freedom, logic, and reason with a near-fascistic adoration of male physical prowess and direct violence as the ultimate solution to all political problems, is muddy at best, frightening at worst, its fascination with the aesthetic possibilities of blood loosed from the human body--whether spraying, spurting, or splashing--is absolutely clear.

The blood spray has a long and storied cinematic history, dating back at least as far as 1916 when D.W. Griffith staged a massive battle sequence in his epic Intolerance that included a full-on shot of one warrior gouging his spear into another warrior's stomach. Of course, that bit of cinematic bloodletting lacked any aesthetic embellishment, as Griffith was content to simply record the gruesomeness of blood flowing freely as the blade penetrated flesh. Akira Kurosawa took the blood spurt to a new level in 1962 when he concluded Sanjuro with an outlandish sword-induced spray--nay, geyser--of blood from the chest of Tatsuya Nakadai. Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah then added the flourish of slow motion to blood spurts in the late 1960s in the shoot-outs in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969) respectively, which set the aesthetic norm for stylized violence ever since.

300 takes what Penn and Peckinpah pioneered and adds Matrix-style command of time and space to focus the audience's attention on the artistically striking ballet of blood spray that results from swords, axes, and other bladed instruments of bodily harm ripping through flesh. In battle after battle the camera tracks along fierce, model-perfect warriors as they hack their way through their opponents. The image slows down each time metal meets flesh so that we may relish the digital rendering of blood as it sprays from the body.

And, while it would seem that this approach would enhance the violence, giving it a brutal physicality that emphasizes the realities of such brutal forms of warfare, in fact it does just the opposite. The blood is video-game blood, carefully rendered for maximum aesthetic pleasure and a minimum of visceral impact. The fact that the blood literally evaporates from the air and never seems to hit the ground or the warriors (they stay remarkably clean considering all the butchery going on) lends it an air of two-dimensional artifice that robs the imagery of any real punch. For all its explicit goriness, 300 has all the impact of a cartoon.

The story is rooted firmly in the gray area between history and myth, which is also true of its source material, the critically lauded graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley (as Robert Rodriguez did with 2005's Sin City, Snyder translates the visual look of Miller's still images almost directly). Around 481 B.C., King Xerxes of Persia did in fact amass an army of hundreds of thousands from Asia and Africa with the intention of invading Greece, which at that time was divided between the Spartans and the Athenians (who, nonetheless, must unite forces, although the latter's ultimate weakness and cowardice only serves to make the Spartans seem that much more towering in their single-minded bravery). A small army of determined Spartans met the Persians head on and held their ground at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, which at least partially leveled the battlefield by making sheer numbers irrelevant to victory.

Miller's and the film's take on the subject matter veers more into the arena of hero worship than straight history, which makes for a complicated understanding of what is truly valued. The hero is the Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), who is depicted as the very essence of honor, nobility, and masculine prowess, leading an army of similarly minded he-men who are less characters than they are a parade of chiseled abs. The fact that Leonidas' most lauded qualities were literally beaten into him as a child, where he was taught from the time he could walk to be a mighty warrior, is presented without critical comment; his coming-of-age moment is fighting off a vicious wolf by luring it into a narrow mountain passage--a visual foreshadowing of the real battle to come. Leonidas' wife, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), is a proto-feminist pillar of strength who feels free to speak her mind among men, but whose primary duty is to support her embattled husband.

Some may feel it impossible to view the film without a rather queasy sense of the fascistic agenda it so clearly embraces. It's as if the filmmakers swallowed Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) and David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) and missed the point that those films' rallying cries about killing machines and hypermasculinity were meant to be satirical. The fact that 300's opening shot is a pile of skulls representing physically flawed Spartan babies who were dropped to their deaths lest the populace be sullied with something less than perfection (which is graphically represented by a traitorous hunchback whose parents saved him from early annihilation) is deeply troubling, especially since the film goes to such lengths to lionize Spartan culture and all it stands for. There are problems in Sparta, to be sure, specifically corrupt politicians like Theron (Dominic West), but they are nothing some impassioned rhetoric or, better yet, a sword can't take care of.

The film's depictions of the Persians are equally problematic, especially since their African and Asian features place them squarely in opposite to the Aryan grandiosity of the Greeks, which creates an uneasy racial subtext. King Xerxes is played by Rodrigo Santoro as a throaty-voiced queen, decked head to toe in gold chains and rings and compelled by his god complex to take over the world. (If one were really paranoid, one could arguably read the entire film as a conservative white straight man's ultimate nightmare: besieged by a vast army of gay ethnic minorities bent on world domination.)

Yet, is the ideology of 300 any different from most Hollywood action films, which tend to lionize powerful men and demonize foreign others? Is it possible that 300 is just a pure distillation of the same, comfortably fascistic fantasies that have been circulating through Hollywood-fueled popular culture for decades? There is no doubt that 300 is an impressive aesthetic achievement, even if it inadvertently reduces the violence of battle to cartoonish proportions that make the film as a whole much less involving than it should be. Yet, anyone who thinks beyond the digitally-enhanced surface of 300 and the accompanying exhilaration it often creates might feel slightly sick at having just swallowed what may be the most impressive bit of fascist fantasy worship since World War II.

300 DVD
300 is available in both widescreen and full-screen single-disc editions, as well as a two-disc Special Edition.
Aspect Ratio1.33:1
AnamorphicNo
Audio
  • English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • English Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
  • Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • French Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • Subtitles English, French, Spanish
    Supplements
  • Audio commentary by director Zack Snyder, screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, and director of photography Larry Fong
  • DistributorWarner Bros. Home Entertainment
    SRP$29.99
    Release DateJuly 31, 2007

    VIDEO & AUDIO
    Unfortunately, the review disc I received is the full-frame edition, so I cannot comment on the quality of the anamorphically enhanced widescreen version. Issues of cropping aside, the visual quality of the transfer on 300 is outstanding: crisp, clear, and extremely detailed. The depth of the image reflects its digital nature, and in some ways it looks more cartoonish now than it did in theatrical release. The color schemes in the film are decidedly muted, with grays, browns, and ambers dominating, except when all that bright red blood splashes, although most of the time even that it purposefully darkened. The Dolby Digital 5.1 surround soundtrack is outstanding, using the surround channels to create an effectively enveloping atmosphere that draws you right into the chaos on screen. Fidelity and directionality are both excellent throughout.
    SUPPLEMENTS
    The only supplement on the single-disc edition is an extremely disappointing screen-specific audio commentary by director Zack Snyder, screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, and cinematographer Larry Fong. Although it is a three-person endeavor, Snyder pretty much dominates the proceedings, and his discussion of the film is uniformly shallow, rarely if ever penetrating the surface. Virtually all of his comments (which are frequently spaced by lengthy silences) fall into one of two categories: how much of each shot is computer-generated and whether a particular shot is a replica of a panel in the graphic novel. He does comment on how much he likes things, too, such as the shot in which the giant is beheaded: “Here's the beheading. Nice. I like that little stretchy bit.”

    Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick

    Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

    All images copyright © Warner Bros.

    Overall Rating: (2)




    James Kendrick

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