300

4.5 out of 10

Frank Miller is one of comic-dom's true auteurs, a writer and artist combo primarily responsible for some of the touchstones of serious modern comics. What's surprising is that after a few early stumbles, Miller's work might be even more influential in film than in comics. The Dark Knight Returns proved how challenging superheroes could really be. His Sin City franchise (including the film he co-directed) is noir distilled into nothing but black and white, ink and paper, shadow and light. Most comics are created with a production line: the writer to the penciler to the inker, colorist, letterer, etc. Since he does most of that himself, Miller's near-total control of his projects makes it impossible to separate style from content. 300 was an ambitiously ballsy project, a five-issue miniseries recounting the Spartan part in the battle of Thermopylae done entirely in two-page splash panels. The story was ripe for Miller's manly-man politicizing, but he doesn't shy away from the basic fact that the Spartans were bugfuck crazy.

300 may not be a good film, or even a particularly enjoyable one no matter how deep your love of sword-and-sandal action, but it will surely be remembered and it will surely have an influence on films to come. The question for any potential viewer is whether the film's visual innovations will be enough to overcome the plodding dialogue and subplots, the lazy inaccuracies, and the ludicrous costume choices.

In the last decade, digital coloring has taken comics far beyond the limited colors and dot-patterns that used to be the norm. Miller's only collaborator on the book was Lynn Varley, who digitally colored the panels in luscious, brutal textures. The film 300 carries this over, with most of the shots tweaked out of reality for dramatic effect. Some critics will bemoan cinema's loss of 'realism' (which it never really had) but 300's digital composition represents a new era of freedom for the filmmaker. The image can be crafted in ways that are simply impossible with just a camera and film. Think the scene would be more powerful if the sky were cloudy, brown, or even purple? Done. Sin City and 300 opened the door to a brand new way of filmmaking, where the images are crafted from the ground up and every element, prop, actor and background can be manipulated for dramatic effect. Not every technique will be appropriate for every story, and we will undoubtedly see gratuitous use of these techniques in the near future, but in the hands of masters they will produce cinema unlike anything we've seen before.

But, as the old saying goes, you can't polish a turd. For all the tragedy and drama inherent in the story of Thermopylae, 300 is remarkably dull in everything but the action scenes. The depiction of phalanx tactics is excellent and the fighting is exciting, frightening, and gory (I consider that a positive adjective). It's when we slow down and talk that things get bad. The film's addition of a subplot involving the political debate at home in Sparta is useless and distracting. The non-battle scenes of the army aren't a whole lot better. Much of the dialogue is lifted straight from the comic, but it sounds far worse than it read. I wouldn't be surprised if the film gets better reviews overseas, where subtitles will move the focus to what the characters are saying rather than how ridiculously they're saying it. In the run-up to release, there's been a lot of discussion about whether 300 has a political message and it's easy to see why, but the appearance of loaded phrases like "Freedom isn't free" are better indicators of the screenwriter's laziness and susceptibility to cliché than politics. The film is sloppy in its research too. To site one example, a Persian envoy calls the Spartans "barbarians." While somewhat suitable given modern use of the word, as this Classics minor learned on no less than three occasions, the word "barbarian" was a Greek term for anyone who didn't speak Greek, mocking other languages as sounding like "bar-bar-bar".

And I would be remiss if I didn't address the costume choices. Somehow, loincloths and robes come off far sillier outside of a comic book. Maybe it's that every single Spartan has perfectly sculpted and hairless pectoral and abdominal muscles. Maybe it's that they don't close their robes, even for warmth. And maybe it's that I found myself wondering where, in such limited accoutrements, they carried their helmets.

Directed by Zack Snyder; Written by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, and Michael Gordon from the comic book by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey and Dominic West.

Viewed on 09Mar2007 at Cinetopia Theater

posted by Jesse Zander Corum @ 1:22 AM