A "review" of 300

Ladies and gentlemen of the American movie-going public, I cannot stress this enough. Run. Do not hesitate, fumble, or falter. Do not waste time, do not contemplate your actions. Run, I say. Run, don't walk, away from 300. Your very life may depend upon it.

When I first saw the trailer for 300, it looked gorgeous. Gold and copper tones highlighted the film and the slow-motion action sequences looked like living comic book pages. It was Sin City, BC. When the film was released on 2007-03-09, I was prevented from seeing it on opening night by job duties. As the early reports started coming in, there were criticisms of the film's plot, the acting, and the overt modern political parallels forced onto the unrelated landscape of ancient Greek combat.

They were all right, but they were all wrong.

The critics were right. The film is heavy-handed in discussing freedom and how we must vigilantly fight against sinister Middle Eastern forces who wish to do us harm. The film is bland in plot and trite, clichéd even, in dialogue. The music is inappropriate and every frame is inaccurate to the point of anachronism. So what? 300 is not even remotely intended to be a film that aspires to be anything other than a neat way to show some new special effects and look pretty doing it.

The critics were wrong. They were not wrong in their poor opinions of the film, but in the weakness of their delivery of the message. "The acting is poor in this film," they said, a understatement that is criminally negligent of the sanctity of their duties of critic and reviewer. Last year they may as well have said "Hurricane Katrina would make visiting New Orleans slightly unpleasant". Or perhaps "Mike Tyson is a bit aggressive".

I believe that it is a person's duty as a human being to warn friend and foe alike of the dangers of seeing this movie. In truth, I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to waste 117 minutes of his life on this travesty of cinema. I'll say it again:

Kant believed that is a moral imperative for a man who is capable of intervening to prevent another from causing harm to himself through ignorance. You are expected, for example, to prevent a blind person from walking into a burning building. You possess the faculties to know that they are both in danger and incapable of recognizing so. As a human being, it is your responsibility to intercept them and keep them safe. It is an essential attribute of our own humanity to protect our own kind from immanent danger. Just as I would act to stop a total stranger from falling down an open elevator shaft, I would act to keep people from seeing 300. Let's discuss why.

Walking into the theater, I had very low expectations. I'd heard bad things and I was pretty much just expecting a movie that looked good. If the film had delivered even this small thing, I would not have been disappointed. Instead, I was tortured for 2 hours while some buff actors in front of a blue screen committed act after act of grotesque video game violence with the picture's saturation turned way way down. Hell, it wasn't even 2 hours of fighting. They tried to work a mediocre plot into the mix, too. While the Spartans are kicking everybody's ass, there's some insipid quote-unquote "drama" surrounding the queen trying to drum up some city-state support to mobilize more troops.

Just as Sin City suffered from an imbalanced emphasis of style over substance, 300 is devoid of any significant content. Unlike Sin City, however, the style in 300 just isn't enough to carry the rest of the film. The movie is stylish, but not stylish enough to actually make you feel justified that you spent 2 hours listening to insipid soundbites spat from the MacBook of the lowliest J. T. LeRoy wannabes. To wit:

Some dying Spartan: "It's an honor to die next to you."
The King of Sparta: "It's an honor to live next to you."

Do you see what he did? He took what that first guy said and turned it very slightly around! Wow! What incredible mastery of writing it is to pull off such a witty bon mot! And that's not the only incident in the movie where Frank Miller's writing is bastardized into something retarded. In one scene, the queen of Sparta — arguably a very important position in town — has to bang a seedy councillor just to gain an audience with the city elders and politicians. (Uh, OK. Whatever.) As the sleazy politico is preparing to forcibly mount Her Majesty, he taunts her and warns that he will make sure that what she is about to experience will not be quick or pleasant for her. At that point, I kind of wanted to go take a shower, but after he gets her some floor time with the decision makers the following day, he ends up sabotaging her speech and calling her an adulterer and a whore. She winds up stabbing him to death in front of the whole parliament, and here's the twist: as she's stabbing him, she pulls him close and whispers in his ear that she will not make his death quick or pleasant!

You go girl! You took the words that he said to you as he defiled you and then said them right back to him! You must have learned that from your husband before he left!

In my imagination, this isn't a fault of the screenwriters for 300, and it's just common knowledge in Sparta that the royal family just aren't very good conversationalists:

Spartan: "Your majesty, the people have toiled in the fields to make a feast."
The King of Sparta: "Spartan, the people have feasted in the fields so that they may toil."
Spartan: "What? Oh, right. Moving on. We also have a shortage of corn for the harvest."
The King of Sparta: "Then we must have a shortage of harvest for our corn."
Spartan: "Sire, are you retarded or something?"

This glut of hackneyed faux writing taints the film from start to finish, and you have to start sifting through meaningless scene after meaningless scene looking for something salvageable. I can't blame the actors for failing to really give their all for such terrible writing. The stylistic choices of making everything look copper ends up giving the film a faded look. Ultimately, 300 eschews any kind of message and instead descends into absurdity and full-on what-the-fuckisms. Instead of a rockin' tale about warriors defending their home, the movie skips gears and begins to assault the audience with non-sequiturs and deliberately bizarre scenes like goat-headed musicians playing for a harem of pierced transsexuals. Instead of the epic fight sequences from the Lord of the Rings movies, we end up with choppy, stunted action snippets of primarily one-on-three-or-four combat. My friend Nevin suggests that they tried to capture the same vibe of Lord of the Rings, but made the fundamental mistake of thinking it was OK to substitute New Zealand with Quebec.

The individual combat sequences themselves — fighting being the only feature of the film that could have possibly been considered worthwhile — are for shit. They'd be fantastic if the cinematography didn't make them look washed out and claustrophobic. It's like you aren't so much watching a movie but are instead playing a giant video game on a movie theater screen. The moves of the combatants are fluid and pretty, but as formulaic as right-right-right-left or up-up-up-down-towards. More than once I felt like I was watching the next logical progression of the interactive fighting game. There's plenty of chopping, cutting, and dismemberment, complete with el fake-o arterial spurting. 300 isn't a movie so much as it's what it would be like if somebody found a way to play Rome: Total War with the Mortal Kombat blood code turned on. For the uninitiated, the blood code (A-B-A-C-A-B-B) was a means of taking the Sega Genesis game from PG to PG-13 by adding "realistic" blood spurts whenever the fighters pounded on each other and the ability to execute horrific "fatality" maneuvers on wobbly, defeated opponents. The blood wasn't really realistic. It was a contrived splatter of red dots that would fly around the screen and disappear after a few moments, exactly the way mortal wounds act in 300. The copious quantity of sword chops and spear wounds all generate plenty of blood spray, artificially glooping out of the victim and freezing in mid air for a second before sort of just fading out of existence forever. The physics of blood spatter in Greece is apparently unaffected by forces like gravity or momentum. Maybe some benevolent time traveler would like to give the ancient Greeks access to an Xbox 360 so they can use a better physics engine and get that fixed because without it, the unfathomable depravity of men slaughtering each other just looks stupid.

Regrettably, at no point in this ridiculous video game of a movie did anyone shout "Get over here!" or "Level up!" or "I'm sorry, but the princess is in another castle". The only real difference between 300 and a video game is that video games tend to have better exposition sequences, graphics, and dialogue. 300 also doesn't have any pauses for "Loading..." screens while the audience waits for the next scene to cache. I guess that means there's one good thing about this movie.

As it turns out, Sin City still had a pretty good plot to fit its revolutionary new film style and daring cinematography. 300, I'm happy to say, will serve as a terrific counterpoint to what a director can accomplish when he tries to put a comic book on film without having to stress out about things like acting, plot, writing, or making anything look good. I'd like to end this review with a joke I just thought up. Q. How would you describe the good, the bad, and the ugly? A. Sin City and 300 twice.

Are you laughing? Me neither.