Day 300 - 10/27/09 - Movie #300
BEFORE: I hate to interrupt the horror films, and the M. Night Shyamalan chain, but I can't resist the temptation to mark this milestone with this film, so appropriately titled. I'm actually upset that I didn't arrange my October movies differently - I should have led into this film with "The Scorpion King", for back-to-back ancient battle scenes, or even with "Phantom of the Opera", for back-to-back Gerard Butler films. Heck, since this was based on a comic book I could have even justified linking it with "Blade" or "Hellboy." Oh well, what's done is done - I'm looking forward to this film, since it was directed by Zack Snyder, who did such a fantastic job with "Watchmen."
THE PLOT: King Leonidas and a force of 300 men fight the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C.
AFTER: Actually, I think this DOES count as a horror film - certainly the focus is on the horrors of war, as a relative handful of Spartans tries to hold off the entire Persian army at a mountain pass. We're meant to root for the Spartans because they're "free men" while the Persian army is made up of slaves. But does that mean that the slaves deserve to die more? If they're slaves, they're not in control of their situation, and they're not soldiers by choice - but I guess by Spartan logic, this means they're just meaningless pawns, and therefore quite expendable.
Also horrific is the array of bizarre creatures sent into battle by the Persians - there's a wave of ninja-like "Immortals" that look like fierce animals under their masks, and a giant, fanged grunting brute who seems to be 10 feet tall. Xerxes himself, leader of the Persians, seems to be an abnormally tall man/god also, dwarfing King Leonidas during a mid-battle meeting that seemed full of homoerotic tension - or was I reading too much between the lines?
The endless fighting scenes are beautifully shot and choreographed, or at least they're as beautiful as hand-to-hand combat can be - like a ballet with blood and severed heads. The Persians have armies from all over Asia, so in addition to the ninjas, they've got elephants, rhinos, giants, mystics with gunpowder bombs (that anachronism AGAIN?) and a guy with lobster claws for hands (seriously?) and they all learn the hard way not to mess with Spartans.
The movie seems very informative about Spartan fighting techniques and their warrior-based society. I didn't know, for example, that so many of them had Scottish accents! Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas (aka MacScreamy) who barks out all his lines over-dramatically (We...Are...Spartans!) including, one would assume, his army's lunch orders (We...Want...Pastrami!)
The effects are dazzling, at times because of their invisibility - it's so easy to imagine that you're seeing limbs being hacked off for real - and other times for their grandeur, like seeing an ocean filled with tempest-tossed boats, or an army that stretches all the way to the horizon and beyond, when viewed from a mountaintop. I also liked when the sky darkened because of thousands of arrows in flight (so that's what that would look like...)
That's TWO famous comic-books brought to cinematic life by Zack Snyder - get this guy to work on the Sandman movie fast!
RATING: 7 out of 10 golden helmets
SPOOK-O-METER: 3 out of 10 (for nasty hunchbacks and brutish giants)
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Actually, I had no idea this was based on a comic book before watching it in the theater, and because of that I was a bit disappointed. I didn't expect all the over the top persions and gongfu fighting moves of the Spartans. Not sure why the historical event needed a comic book interpetation. (I guess they are attempting to brake into the historical comic book field, which has perviously been exclusively the relm of the Japanese comics)
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