Review By: Stephen Snart
StephenSnart@TheCinemaSource.com

On December 20, 2006, Warner Brothers released Letters from Iwo Jima, possibly the most genuinely anti-war themed studio combat film since The Deer Hunter. Now, on March 9, 2007, Warner Brothers releases 300, the most staunchly pro-war themed studio combat film since The Green Berets.

Adapted from a graphic novel by comic book artist extraordinaire Frank Miller (of Sin City fame), Zach Snyder’s 300 is a loose retelling of the epic battle of Thermopylae, in which a vastly outnumbered troop of 300 fierce Spartan warriors boldly went to war against the Persian army. This is a film in which the lead characters have been ‘baptized in the field of combat’ and thus get off at the prospect of ruthlessly obliterating their foes in hand-to-hand combat. Through graphic stylization, the audience members are invited to do the same with numerous slow-motion sword incisions and lingering shots of blood-soaked arrow heads that welcome fist pumps and cheerful exclamations of ‘hell yeah’ and ‘oh shit!’

Led by the Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) in a stance against the tyranny and mysticism of Persian Emperor Xerxes I (Rodrigo Santoro), the stoic group of cape and underwear-clad soldiers could not be intimidated and marched heroically into their unavoidable doom.

While most of the film takes place on the battle field, there are some occasional returns to the town of Sparta, where the strong Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) must deal with the potential political revolt in the wake of her husband’s decision to depart on a battle that can only result in a Pyrrhic victory at best. Here we learn that slow-motion filmmaking is not reserved solely for battle scenes but can also be used for saunters through the marketplace.

Designed as a shot-by-shot adaptation of Miller’s graphic novel, Snyder shot the entire film in a Montreal studio using blue-screen backgrounds and computer generated imagery to recreate the startling look of Miller’s artwork. As such, the film has an aesthetic akin to Sin City and the Star Wars prequels which aligns the film somewhere between video game and neoclassicist painting.

This allows for some truly arresting visuals, most memorably the sight of Persian ships arriving during a fierce thunder storm and a survey of the bloodshed after the final battle. But it also allows for some clunky animation; a few of the backgrounds don’t look all that removed from painted backdrops of the 50s. There are also some incredibly unconvincing depictions of animals, particularly the jerky animatronic wolf and the unrealistic movements of a rhino. More distracting are the monstrous creatures randomly thrown in alongside the plethora of Adonis-like men that even includes a Gollum-on-steroids type oddity hobbling around the outskirts.

This highlights the bigger issue with 300, every single element is so explicitly artificial that the viewer is forced to question everything, even the tiny ripples of inflation and deflation on Butler’s sizeable six-pack while he barks orders. There’s a nagging disconnect between all this hyper-stylization and the true story about the ...