300
Directed by Zack Snyder
300 could very well go down as a watershed moment in filmmaking. No, it’s not a particularly great movie; it is entertaining, but it’s not exactly an exercise in sophisticated storytelling. It is, however, groundbreaking as far as technical achievement. For years now, anytime a movie laden with CGI and special effects has opened, there have usually been complaints about the look of the effects and how they don’t look like they actually exist in the same world as the real elements. 300 partially avoids this by going for a stylistic look rather than a realistic one, but however the result is achieved, in the end, it feels as if the actors exist in the same world as the generated scenery and creatures around them. This technical success proves something that’s been creeping up for a while now — if a filmmaker wants to create a grand and detailed location, scouting and sets are much less necessary than they once were. One need only put their actors in a warehouse with green and blue screens.
Now, as for the storytelling itself, 300 — a retelling of The Battle Of Thermopylae — is rather simple. Three hundred Spartans stand against the largest army ever assembled for the idealistic cause of preserving their peoples’ freedom. Nearly every scene is a violent spectacle, but it’s hard to mark a movie about the Spartans — ancient Greece’s most aggressive and warlike group — as “gratuitously violent.” If you’re looking for gratuity, there’s the sex. Peppered throughout the film are a handful of scenes that rely on sex and/or the victimization of women — specifically that of Queen Gorgo. Of course, women in Sparta were not seen as equals of men, so some sort of representation of that is understandable, but these scenes seemed to follow all too closely the usual Hollywood crutch applied to female characterization in movies dominated by men. These scenes did not seem to be subscribing to any sort of historical accuracy, therefore their inclusion and execution seem trite and are disappointing.
Already, people have been drawing parallels between the film and current events. As someone who has read the 1998 comic book series on which it was based, I can attest that the original does seem, in retrospect, to portend the coming of some sort of conflict. Frank Miller is, after all, known for injecting his politics and world-view into his works (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Give Me Liberty), so it’s no stretch to assume that he similarly did so with 300. If so, his tale of “the forces of freedom” taking on those ideologically opposed to such in a more or less black and white conflict seems particularly anticipatory of the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s inept prosecution of the war on terror. But, really, the Persian army is not the greatest analog for Al Quaeda; the Persian forces were massive and attacked out in the open en masse, presenting a clear target to be countered. Painting such a threat as that in black and white, good versus evil terms is much easier to do than with an enemy who attacks from the shadows and rarely, if ever, engages directly or in large numbers.
For that matter, cries of foul by the Iranian government about the portrayal of Persians as surrogates for themselves are particularly specious. If you want to complain that all the Greeks in the film are portrayed by people with lighter skin and have European accents and that the Persian hordes are composed of people of dark skin with particularly non-Western sounding accents, there’s legitimate concern to be had there. I’m no expert on the racial makeup of the groups involved in the actual historical conflict, so I can’t attest to any authenticity or lack thereof on this point, but it was particularly striking. But please, unless Iran suddenly turns into a superpower that can threaten to dominate the rest of the world, the idea that this movie is meant to advance Western dislike of Persian descendants is patently ridiculous.