All washboard abs, set jaws and steely eyes, the 300 Spartans of 300 come off like the toughest sumbitches ever. Which is fitting, because their historical counterparts probably were—and none more so than their king, Leonidas, who stood with them against the vastly larger Persian army in the Battle of Thermopylae, perhaps the most famous last stand in recorded history.
Leonidas is played by Scottish actor Gerard Butler. Butler’s accent sounds more tartan than Spartan, but with his bulked-up frame topped off by an authentic ancient Greek beard and helmet-head haircut, he looks like a statue of Heracles come to life. He’s the linchpin of the entire film, and after the bleach-blond unbelievability of Colin Farrell’s Alexander the Great and Brad Pitt’s Achilles, he’s impressively convincing.
Because the film is based on history, we get the backstory mainly through bits narrated to us by the same character who will eventually narrate it to the rest of Sparta. But because the film is also based on a graphic novel by comic-book auteur Frank Miller, historical accuracy is hardly the point. This film isn’t aiming for documentary realism; it’s aiming for Miller’s particular brand of pulpy fanboy fantasy, and it hits that mark as accurately as a Spartan-thrown spear. In Miller’s hands, the story becomes a mythologized Homeric version of Herodotus’s historical account. Our 300 heroes aren’t up against mere men: the Persian elite unit known as the Immortals are more like monsters. As if that weren’t enough, the Persian ruler Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is an eight-foot-tall demigod decked out in sharp fingernails and head-to-toe gold jewelry. It’s the kind of thing the ancient Greeks would have appreciated.
The film’s other influences are clear—Miller’s graphic novel was inspired by the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, and the writers borrow from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator to deepen Leonidas’s relationship with his wife, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey)—but the computer-generated visuals take the sword-and-sandal epic to new heights of bronze-toned glossiness. Like Robert Rodriguez did in his brilliant 2005 adaptation of Miller’s Sin City, director and co-writer Zack Snyder draws storyboards and dialogue directly from the graphic novel. Unlike Rodriguez, however, Snyder doesn’t pull off a seamless integration of Miller’s distinctive artwork into the moving medium. When it’s not in Matrix-style battle scene mode, the film is less like a motion picture than a graphic novel writ large, a series of stunning images suitable for freeze-framing on wall-mounted widescreens.
But when it is in motion, 300 is a hypnotic dance of blood-spattering ultraviolence as the disciplined Spartan phalanx impales and amputates its way through wave after wave of Persians. The bodies literally pile up; in one scene, the Spartans use them as “mortar” in the wall they’ve rebuilt to keep the Persians bottlenecked. Speaking of “hypnotic dance,” there’s also a scene in which an all-but-naked female oracle does a spasmodic back-arching number, presumably to help her predict the battle’s outcome. There’s also a steamy interlude between Leonidas and Gorgo in which bums and breasts figure prominently. (In Miller’s world, the only thing harder than the men are the women’s nipples.) When sex and death are this brazenly stylized, it’s hard to decide which is sexier.
(3/4)