Walking to my car after the screening of 300, I heard from across the parking lot a group of guys loudly echoing the Spartan war cry from the film; sadly, it's guys like that who will love this movie, which is so militaristic and single-minded that it's like a CGI-heavy blockbuster version of Triumph of the Will. It's brutal, it's painful, it's mind-numbing and, most disturbingly, it's a rallying cry for the testosterone-heavy that posits "no mercy" as the most noble sentiment in the world. The U.S. Army needs to pick this up as a recruiting film, stat.
Or, maybe not. The film, which is about the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., certainly doesn't advocate the invasion of another country (its heroic, outnumbered Spartans are fighting back an invasion of their lands from the Persian army). But 300 does play on the basest, most animalistic impulses of its audience, advocating a violence-uber-alles ethos that's sickening in its manipulation and, worse, repetitive and deadening after about 10 minutes.
Based on the graphic novel by Sin City creator Frank Miller, 300 has an undeniable historical hook: Thanks to the whiny indecision of corrupt religious leaders and spineless bureaucrats, unbelievably manly Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) is unable to take his full army to meet the massive Persian forces, and must make do with only 300 of his best soldiers, acting as his personal retinue. Facing overwhelming odds, they beat back what seems like thousands of Persians before perishing valiantly and inspiring their fellow Greeks to successfully fend off the invaders.
Hurrah, cue inspirational score, right? Well, aside from the fact that Tyler Bates' bombastic, punishing music makes Wagner (or, alternately, Megadeth) sound subtle, unless your idea of inspirational is an ode to fascism, not quite. Never has a movie so dedicated to heroism seemed so nasty and mean-spirited. Director Zack Snyder luxuriates in the severing of limbs and heads and the grotesque deaths of as many Persians as possible, glorifying the Spartan culture that tosses aside weak infants and tears young boys away from their families at age 7 to learn how to fight and kill. His battle scenes are staged with such disgusting fetishism that if you took out all the slo-mo, the movie would be half as long.
But damn if you can't admire his technical skill: Like Sin City, 300 was shot against green screens using minimal physical sets, and if it doesn't much resemble reality, it pretty well approximates the widescreen, hyper-stylized nature of Miller's artwork. Snyder incorporates virtually everything that Miller put into his graphic novel, delivering some beautiful images along the way and reproducing some of Miller's best one-liners.
He also piles on more deformed, weird creatures that certainly never existed in ancient Greece or anywhere, and makes Persian leader Xerxes flamingly effeminate, just in case you didn't get the message that hyper-masculinity was the path to righteousness. Snyder does do Miller one better by creating a significant role for a female character, Leonidas' wife (Lena Headey), who had only two or three lines in the graphic novel. She gets a whole subplot in which she tries to use diplomacy to convince the Spartan council to send her husband some reinforcements. Naturally, she fails, right after being sexually assaulted; in Sparta, violence is the only solution.