Sound and fury
The new movie account of the battle of Thermopylae, Zach Snyder’s 300, took more money in its first week in US theatres than any other movie this year. It will probably do similarly respectable business here when it opens today in IMAX as well as normal screens around Australia. But to take this box-office behemoth seriously on any terms other than its ability to generate profit is futile.
Who knows who was responsible for selling the concept to a major studio, but from the evidence on screen you can imagine it went something like this. The film version of Frank Miller’s graphic novel Sin City did respectable business and showed that shooting a movie with actors against blue screens and filling in the backgrounds with CGI could work. Miller’s comic book version of the Spartans versus Persians battle presented a more ambitious challenge but there were obvious advantages. A realistic movie with location shooting would cost maybe $200 million but the CGI approach would bring the budget down to about $60 million.
Shot entirely in Montr? studios, apart from one day of location filming involving real horses, 300 presents a reasonable depiction of the battle between the 300 Spartans and the million Persians, complete with mostly digitised soldiers and even a digital charging rhinoceros and digital elephants. As with Sin City, the visuals are highly stylised, with a limited colour palette that gets boring after a while. Even the costumes are unrealistic, which may explain 300‘s appeal to gay audiences. In battle, the Spartans carry large shields and red capes but wear mainly tiny, tight leather shorts, the better to display the results of months of strenuous working out. Highly inauthentic, but hey, 300 has more impressively defined abs on screen than any movie in recent memory.
History tells us that homosexual relationships were encouraged to help them bond with their comrades but there is no evidence of that here. The Persians, however, are remarkably decadent, led by the heavily bejewelled King Xerxes in an even briefer outfit with multiple facial piercings (played by hunky Rodrigo Santoro, currently appearing in episodes of Lost).
So, plenty of eye candy, but not much compelling drama. The script seems to target teenage geeks addicted to computer games. Occasionally the dialogue is unintentionally hilarious, but not frequently enough to satisfy fans of camp movies. Severed limbs and computerised blood fly thick and fast, there’s one spectacularly improbable decapitation, but the violence pales in comparison to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto or the Kill Bill movies. Even on the big IMAX screen, with its startlingly clear sound system, there’s not enough here to maintain interest, certainly little sense of the importance of this battle in shaping Europe’s destiny. If only it was as entertaining as Zach Snyder’s last movie, his 2004 rollicking remake of George Romero’s zombie bloodfest Dawn Of The Dead.
