300 (***)

? The title refers not to bowling, but to the number of Spartan soldiers who, with few allies, fought an overwhelmingly numerically superior invading Persian army at Thermopylae some 2500 years ago. Directed by Zack Snyder (2004’s Dawn of the Dead), 300 takes as its source a graphic novel by Frank Miller (Sin City) and Lynn Varley. Miller, in turn, was inspired by 1962’s The 300 Spartans, which told the same story. Gerard Butler plays the fearsome Spartan king Leonidas, who spends much of the movie bare-chested, and Lena Headey his loyal (and nearly as fearsome) wife, who spends much of the movie trying to persuade the city-state’s council to send further reinforcements.
+ Unlike, say, Gladiator, 300 leans much more in the direction of action movie than history lesson or character drama. Its tight structure makes movies like Troy seem flaccid and overblown. Take, for example, the voiced-over introduction, depicting in a couple of minutes Leonidas’s boyhood immersion in the militaristic culture of his homeland. It’s at once over-the-top, captivatingly scary, and concise. Although not in the overt comic-book style of Sin City, most of the backgrounds are computer-generated so as to provide a slightly otherworldly look. When, early in the movie, Leonidas climbs a giant rock to seek the council of the Oracle of Delphi, the angle of ascent seems just on the impossible side. Leonidas himself appears to be nearly a giant, and Butler’s superb performance enhances the illusion. It’s easy to see why his men were so loyal. Although the meticulous depiction of violence is what will bring out the audience, the key plot elements are intelligently presented so as to make the strategy and the timeline of the battle understandable.
- I feared this might be a triumph of style over substance, and it isn’t, but it might be said that it’s a triumph of certitude over moral complexity. There may be practical value, and even glory, in the willingness to sacrifice oneself to a cause, but you get the feeling here that Leonidas’s men, as portrayed here, see glory in death itself. They can hardly be said to be brave, because they seem fearless. I saw a parallel with the Japan of World War II. In a sense, 300 embraces the death-before-surrender ethos that Letters from Iwo Jima implicitly criticized. To go along with this attractive vision of a warrior culture, 300 also emphasizes the Spartan contempt for “inferior” individuals. One of the ways the movie departs from strict realism is in featuring exaggerated human grotesqueries, none of whom is portrayed positively. The Spartans are shown to kill abnormally formed babies at birth, but in one scene a hunchback of cartoonish proportions appears. He offers to fight for Leonidas, but the great king says that he is useless. On the Persian side are, among others, a robotic giant and a person with, where an arm should be, a fin used to execute. The Persian leader, Xerxes, looks like a transvestite with a piercing fetish. (Admittedly, the imagery is striking.) The masses of Persian soldiers are portrayed as nearly inhuman hordes, and the Spartans clearly feel superior to other Greeks as well. Leonidas and his men are cast as proto-democratic freedom fighters, but that’s a stretch. It might not be fair to judge ancients by modern standards, but 300 mythologies its subjects to such an extent that it appears to endorse attitudes that, should they pause consider them, many in the audience might well find repugnant.
= *** Notwithstanding the above reservations, cinematically 300 delivers the goods and probably met the testosterone-fueled expectations of the startling number of people who went to see it on its opening weekend.

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reviewed 3/16/07