Entertainment Home Movie Review: 300 Return of 'The Police' James Brown From Modern Rock to the Dawn of the Blues Groovy Kind of Love American Idol Americas Top Model The Blockbusters of 2007 Movie: Children of Men Movie: Pan's Labyrinth The Best Band Movies Movie: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles DVD reviews: Idiocracy The Departed Crank Happy Feet Open Season Beerfest The Prestige Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Casino Royale Little Miss Sunshine

MOVIE review :    300.

by: Anthony Chatfield

A lot of words have been written over the years about violence and its effect on the film industry. The amount of violence that pervades today’s (and yesterday’s) films is seemingly gratuitous, a shock tactic of numbing down the senses to allow even more violence in future films. Sometimes it’s unnecessary. Sometimes it’s over the top. And sometimes it’s just plain incredible.

300, the newest Frank Miller adaptation (a name that’s becoming synonymous with top notch comic book adaptations), is one of those films. It’s a bloody violent epic on the scale of the battle that it portrays, a wonderful tribute to exploitation and epic war films. It’s a terribly good trip down an incredibly bloody battle field for the sake of showing that bloody battle field.

300 is one of those films that people will misunderstand. They’ll point out the wooden lines, or the gratuity of nearly every scene, or the single mindedness, loosely plotted characters. I found myself pondering all of these things when the film first started. Why do they all speak in one liners and where’s the true motivation here? I more or less forgot my questions after 10 minutes though and sat back for a damn fine ride.

This is what 300 is. It’s a comic book come to life. Frank Miller did a lot of things for the comic book industry, not the least of which was darken it up and instill a sense of reality among all the ridiculous premises. He doesn’t pretend we’re reading what very well might be the true story of a man dressing as a bat. It’s obviously fiction, but he instills just enough grit and realism into his hyper-stylized slicked back panache that we could almost see this crazy shit happening in the back alleys of our own streets. That’s Frank Miller’s talent.

And in 300, an admittedly short comic book, he does the same thing with the millennia old tale of a single battle in Greece between 300 Spartans and the entire Persian Army. If you haven’t heard the story by now, it’s rather simple. Xerxes’ is the ruler of Persia, a self-proclaimed God, now trying to take over the world. In doing so, he rides through the country side demanding submission from other rulers. Sparta’s King, Leonidas, decides he’ll have none of that and puts the emissaries to death.

Of course, politically he cannot take his army to war, so he suits up 300 Spartans and takes them to the Hell Gate to stop the Persians. The result is a Spartan envoy capable of staving off over a million Persians for three days and long enough to drum up support for a full Spartan army to meet them.

The actual film is about 75% Spartan battle scenes and 25% everything else I listed above, making it essentially one giant climax. Imagine watching Braveheart and taking the battle scene from the end, throwing it back a few hundred years and watching it for 2 hours. That’s essentially what you get in 300.

The true strength of the film though comes in its devotion to the source material. As I said, it’s not a matter of how well the film is acted or portrayed. Zack Snyder did what Robert Rodriguez did so well with Sin City. He took Miller’s comic book and created as loyal an adaptation of the style and frames as he could. The result is the kind of stiff one liners that drive a comic book, and the shattered, explosive single shots that force every comic book reader to turn to the next page and buy the next issue. At nearly every point of the battle, Snyder will slow it all down, giving the reader a good hard glimpse of his sepia and grey washed Greece and the violence that ensues. The world outside of the battle, outside of a fight, outside of a single sword, drains away and all that’s left is a single shot of a single act, magnificently shot.

And that’s what this film is about, those magnificent single shots. It’s a comic book breathed into live action and as a comic book, it’s superb. Were you to compare it to the great epics of modern film making, Braveheart, Lord of the Rings or any other grand scale battle, you might find it wanting, and that’s because those are larger, more complete films. This is a battle, a punctuated fist to the gut. And that’s all Miller or Snyder wanted it to be.

For that, it’s incredible.

[ Back to top ]

About The Author

I'm a self avowed unemployed writer, working on semi-constant basis to try and overcome the need to go and work a real job. I've written more than 200 articles and reviews and am constantly scouring the internet for any and all excuses and methods to make myself less dependent on corporate pay days. Visit my website at TheChatfield.com

'Entertainment.WebWorlds-One.com' is the name,   - what's the game?

- welcome to Entertainment.WebWorlds-One.com, - an exciting new initiative in info-mercial marketing on the internet.

This is where we bring you(r) postings about Entertainment news and trends in all their various guises . . .

[ Back to top ]

[ Back to top ]

Additional information:

[ Back to top ]

Channels:

Advertising

Other group sites