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300 (2007)
Oh no, they changed history! Now I might never be born! At long last, this is the movie I've been waiting for: a true successor to Conan The Barbarian. Braveheart had it for a while, but lost it when William Wallace started whining about how he only wanted to be a farmer. 300 is an unapologetically barbaric sword-swinging action-fantasy where revenge is awesome, death in battle is glorious, and the weak are useful primarily for making pleasant crunchy sounds as you trample them. It's a movie that wants to crush you beneath the world-shaking majesty of every slo-mo hoofbeat, a bloody, limb-lopping battle epic that doesn't have any weak-ass scenes where we hear some chick yodelling over otherwise silent carnage and brings it all in at under two hours - nice! That's not to say 300 isn't without its problems, or even without problems that make it goofily more charming. 300 was made with strict attention toward following the Frank Miller comic it's based on as closely as possible - right down to voice-over narration that might work okay on the page, but is giggle-inducingly unnecessary in a movie. Choice nuggets: "Only the hard and the strong. Only the hard. Only the strong." I also liked "For (some anachronistic ideal), we march." Repeat, like three times. The setting: ancient Sparta, where we're first shown at length how boys are raised with constant violence (assuming they're not thrown off a cliff at infancy for being too small) and brutal training in order to raise them into the world's greatest fighting machines. Despite being "the world's one hope for reason and justice" (isn't everybody) 300's Sparta is a really shitty place to grow up if you like things like pleasant childhoods and not having the shit beaten out of you by other seven-year-old kids. By the time a kid who looks ten is thrown out into the snow with a loincloth and a stick so he can fight a giant wolf, you should be cluing in that this is a pretty fanciful and fictitious ancient Sparta. The movie then spends much of the rest of its length dropping heavier and heavier hints toward this, and if there's the occasional dimwit who comes away from this movie honestly believing it's a reliable rendition of history, well, that says as much about the film's straight-faced convincingness as it does about the dimwits. The most problematic bit if mangled history is the suggestion that slow, sarcastic clapping was invented in time for ancient Greece. King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) seems like a fighter first and a king second - confident in his rule most of the time, but he does seek and heed his wife's counsel in two of his hardest decisions. (then he nails her in a pretty nice n' hot sex scene which gets a gasp of pleasure out of her in every shot, while he retains the "Spartan reserve" we hear about elsewhere) He's also a bit of a wiseass, but not very good at it - his wiseass moments are delivered with hesitancy as if he's unsure of the wisdom of being a dink right about now. His slur against Athens' population of "boy-lovers" is a loud aside to the crowd looking on, and rings false like a crude, pandering bit of cheer-mongering along the lines of a rock star saying you guys in Calgary are way louder than those guys in Edmonton. He has no fewer than three pre-battle speeches (ugh) but at least they're short, and they seem less about boosting morale than pointing out the simple facts of the situation ("This is where we fight!" Thanks, Leonidas.). Leonidas's training of his son (he seems considerably more affectionate toward his son than his father was with him) is interrupted by a Persian messenger who brings a bag full of the crowned skulls of conquered kings and basically demands that all of Sparta bend over and spread the cheeks for god-king Xerxes (who turns out to be a seven-foot-tall androgyne who loves facial piercings and has the biggest man-borne mobile throne ever). Leonidas's answer to this is to push the messenger into the deepest fucking well in 480 BC. A huge gigantic monster army is coming. How huge? "All the world's warriors", we're told. "Ruler of the world", "armies of the world", "100 nations"...point is, it's really big and Sparta isn't going to get much help. Leonidas would love to have Sparta go to war, but by law, he is required to secure the blessing of Sparta's five ugliest people who the narration refers to twice as "inbred swine". In what is surely one of the most inaccessible temples around (how did these creaky old bastards get up there when Leonidas had to do crazy freehand rock-climbing shit?), the boil-covered hillbillies drug an oracle girl into saying pretty much what they want her to say, that Sparta must not go to war because of some local feast which must not be interrupted. Turns out they've been paid off by an emissary from Xerxes, who promises them gold and a limitless supply of sexy oracle chicks. So Leonidas gathers 300 soldiers and aims to make a stand at a narrow mountain pass where 300 Spartans can defend at great length. They are joined by even more other Greek citizens to try to stave off the Persian army long enough for Sparta to stop feasting and go fight the barbarians at the gate. (a telling moment comes when the Leonidas basically mocks the bravery of these common men risking their lives, pathetic as their efforts might be next to the disciplined might of the Spartans. Oh, you pussy-ass blacksmith.) 300 is light on plot, working in two variables, one from Sparta's sixth ugliest person who wants to fight alongside Leonidas and is rejected pretty quickly. Leonidas doesn't seem to consider the alternative deals he could've offered the freak. After all, he's got all those non-Spartan Greeks ("Brave amateurs...they do their part.") who get a chance to shed some Persian blood without having to be a part of the organized Spartan phalanx. (narration does not note their tendency toward panic and defeatism) The other variable is the subplot of Queen Gorgo, in a subplot more about political maneuvering than battlefield heroics, but what it lacks in excitement it sure makes up for with stopping the movie fucking dead, except for that part which made me say aloud "I think that dude's fucking Gorgo in the ass!" Her long-awaited speech to the senate is really weak, trite shit (basically repeating the "We march" speech, except instead of following each word with "We march", she's preceding them with "Do it for"). Then she stabs a guy, then it suddenly becomes awesome. The Persians in this movie are absolutely, totally vile - slave-whipping, god-king-worshipping, sending the pathetic slave legions in first, embodying "mysticism and tyranny" (what does that make the deformed oracle assholes, Stephen Hawking?), and when they burn down a town, they're not happy to just kill everyone in town, but they nail every single person in town to the same tree. Oh, and they're black. It amused me to wonder who would be more offended by this, Persians or blacks (almost a year later: I don't recall hearing any complaints from blacks). The fantasy elements in 300 are not strong, but there are a few of them - the mountaintop oracle does a swishy, filmed-underwater dance that beggars literal interpretation without magic, and the Persians do employ gigantic elephants and rhinos (and in one deleted scene, a man who appears to be twelve feet tall). The CGI wolf seen at the beginning of the film at first seems like unsure, not-entirely-convincing CGI because it doesn't really look that much like a wolf, but after seeing those elephants and rhinos, I'm not so sure it isn't some fictitious lupine species. A large part of the Persian army is made up of "The Immortals", who have Asiatic-looking face masks and wield katanas of a sort, but underneath, they're basically orcs. Also, there's a guy with a goat's head in the tranny amputee harem. Not some guy wearing a goat's head on top of his own head, but he actually seems to have a goat's head for a head. (I expect tranny amputee harems to be next year's big extravagant accessory...like Hummers were for a while) 300's action is distinct enough that it got parodied in short order on South Park, weaving back and forth between regular speed and slow motion even within shots, most showily in a long shot tracking Leonidas's progression the front lines hacking and hewing his way through the Persians' rather unmotivated first wave of slave soldiers. I think it works better in the dreamy fractional realism here than it does in...well just about any other movie I've seen it in, and that's been a whole bunch since The Matrix. In the movies, swords are always better than guns. They just are. And the moviegoing masses seem to agree, an ocean of rippling abs is better than an ocean of rippling trenchcoats. That this movie managed to present a thuddingly unsubtle homoerotic relationship between two young men (they even kill two people simultaneously while in what amounts to 69 position of sorts) to the most defiantly dedicated generation of you're-a-fag-if-you-don't-like-this internet fans since Gladiator, only makes it more entertaining. (c) Brian J. Wright 2008 BACK TO THE T's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |