Comic-book fangirls and nerdboys, unite in your love of all things campy and violent: 300 is your Holy Grail, a bloody ballet of savagery and sex served to you with no disclaimer and no filler.
Written by Frank Miller – the man who graced comic fans’ wet dreams everywhere with genre classics such as The Dark Knight and Sin City – the comic-book version of 300 was released in 1999 and is loosely based on the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., when a group of 300 Spartan soldiers faced off against hundreds of thousands of invading soldiers from the Persian Army.
Inspired by Miller’s childhood obsession with the film The 300 Spartans, the comic book is infamous for its double-page spread format and consistent use of color, a marked departure from Sin City black-and-white film-noir style. And sure, it might help to have seen that 1962 film or read Miller’s comic book beforehand, but in truth? 300 does a damn good job on its own, a gleaming example of comic-book movie gone horribly right under the direction of Zach Snyder (Dawn of the Dead).
Recreated shot-for-shot from the comic book, 300 focuses on King Leonidas of Sparta (Gerard Butler, Beowulf and Grendel), a deliciously muscled pillar of royalty who exemplifies everything Spartan men are supposed to be: strong, proud, noble, the whole shebang. “Baptized in the fire of combat,” Leonidas and all other strong youths from Sparta are taken from their mothers at age 7 – misshaped or disabled sons are killed as newborns to keep Sparta full of only whole men – to survive on their own in the wilderness and prove that they are, in fact, worthy of a place in Sparta. As Miller wrote and the narrator, Dilios (David Wenham, Van Helsing), says, Leonidas was expected to “return to his people a Spartan – or not at all.”
And return Leonidas did – after a particularly suspenseful fight with a wolf that would burn in Leonidas’ memory the importance of location, location, location – to become King of Sparta, husband to the haughtily attractive Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey, The Brothers Grimm) and father to Pleistarchos (Giovani Antonio Cimmino, As the World Turns ). So when Leonidas is visited by a messenger from the Persian Empire and its emperor, Xerxes, demanding a payment of “earth and water,” he knows he can’t let his homeland be subjected to slavery and death; instead, he does what any sane man would do.
He kicks the messenger and his comrades down a well, plunging Sparta into an illegal war with the millions-strong Persian Empire. Illegal because the inbred, disgustingly foul mystics, or ephors, won’t give their needed consent to the war after their drunk, prepubescent and mostly-naked Oracle Girl (Kelly Craig, performing a dance of softcore proportions) vetoes the idea. What’s a Spartan king to do? Take the war into his own hands, and the hands of 300 of his best men, too, that’s what.
Urged on by Queen Gorgo – who asks him in a strangely JFK-esque moment what a “free man” would do to defend his country – Leonidas decides to meet the invading Persian army head-on at the Hot Gates, a stretch of cliff-surrounded road near Greece’s coast. Followed by his 300 equally-muscled, equally-proud men, Leonidas prepares to take his last stand with “no room for failure, no room for softness – not in Sparta.”
What follows is a dreamlike, surreal and altogether beautifully produced film, as visually amazing as Sin City was two years ago. But 300 is an altogether different kind of captivating, a glossy-around-the-edges spectacle with the grainy, pixelated look comic books are supposed to have. Every single frame of the film is nonsensically lavish, and it’s obvious Miller and Snyder are men who deal in exaggeration: The Persians are all mustachioed brutes, power-hungry barbarians who lust for land and blood; every member of the Spartan 300 is an upstanding young man fighting for the preservation of his country and so on and so forth.
With the exaggerations, there is also a fair amount of cliché to swallow as well. Parts of the film read like a military recruitment brochure, with speeches on how freedom isn’t free and how soldiers should yearn for beautiful deaths in battle – after all, Miller is the same man who now has Batman going off to fight Osama bin Laden and those damn terrorists. Along the terrorist vein, those mustachioed Persians aren’t just brutes. They’re also makeup-wearing, eyebrow-tweezing emperors decked out in more gold than Mr. T could ever afford. Xerxes, who should be terrifying, is instead laughable, as Rodrigo Santoro (Lost) gives an embarrassingly forced performance. And lastly, the dialogue in 300 still sounds – at its best moments – like it was lifted from an unfinished Gladiator script.
And yet even with all its “America, f— yeah!” faults, 300 is still an enjoyable comic-book-to-film, effectively bringing to life the various characters Miller created – the traitorous Theron and Ephialtes, the heroic Stelios, the awesomely dastardly Immortals, they’re all there – in an adaptation that outshines anything either the Batman or Spiderman franchises have released yet. In one of many crucial scenes in 300, Leonidas tells his men,”tonight, we dine in hell” – prepare for a bloody, fiery, fantastically wonderful trip.
Contact reporter Roxana Hadadi at roxanadbk@gmail.com.
