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To say the word Sparta "300" times
Warner Brothers Pictures
Directed by: Zack Snyder
Written by: Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael Gordon
Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West, and David Wenham
Budget: $60,000,000.00
"300", a sword and sandals action film, opened at $70 million becoming the third largest opening weekend for a R-Rated film. How did "300" make all that money? For the life of me I can�t figure it out. The last historical epic of this type to make money was probably "The Last Samurai". What did "300" have that others didn�t? Was it a well written story? Not really. Was it terrific performances? Nope. Was it incredible dialogue? Not so much. It must have been its intellectual and/or emotional depth, right? Absolutely not. Maybe it was fantastic reviews? Nope, even those were average.
What "300" had was a premise and the action and look to make it happen. This movie seems like it was made by guys, about guys, for guys. Yet somehow women seem to love it. I frankly don�t understand. I personally don�t know that many women that are foaming at the mouth to see beheadings, limbs flying through the air, and blood painting the backgrounds. Maybe they all came to see a bunch of manly looking guys in skivvies and capes. This film was like watching a 2 hour behind the scene documentary on the making of a Chippendale�s calendar produced exclusively for the 8 female Dungeons and Dragons fans that exist in this world. In the end, this movie was about testosterone on overdrive. It was violence from beginning to end.
One of the notable and mostly original things this movie had going for it was the fact that the whole environment was created in a computer. What this entails is having the actors in a sound stage acting in front of a blue (in this case, green in other cases) background. The actors are forced to act and interact with a world that is not there. Once the film is shot, it is sent to a Visual Effects Artist (actually an enormous team of them) and they must create the background and environment of the film from scratch. The end result of this was a sight to behold. It looked entirely fake, yet at the same time entirely beautiful. Every shot was absolutely gorgeous and it really put me into a world that I had never seen before. It suited the fantastical elements of the "story" perfectly. I can�t wait to see more films done in this style, provided of course that it makes sense to the picture as a whole. This is definitely not meant for the next Richard Gere and Julia Roberts wacky Romantic Comedy. This style was utilized to bring a graphic novel (AKA comic book for adults) to life. It sure worked. It truly felt like you were elevated into a world that lived between Earth and the imagination.
Now for the more adult elements of the movie, how were the creative craftsmen on the film? The acting was ridiculously over the top. I truly believe this film could have been a silent film (and mostly should have been) as it seemed like the actors were working in pantomime. It appears to me that in ancient Sparta nobody ever talked. Everything they said had to either be yelled or whispered in an eerie manner. The dialogue must have been the most juvenile and ridiculous thing I have ever heard uttered on screen since the last Michael Bay film. Were you aware that the word Sparta and Spartan appears in every single sentence that a Spartan says? In fact, sometimes it appears in the sentence more than once. Sometimes (if we as audience members are so lucky) we can hear a combination of the words Sparta, Spartan, and Spartans in the same sentence. Ugh. It grew so damn tiring. The rest of the dialogue was just cheap, macho, tough guy lines that really could have been thrown away and you would have had a better movie...and it would have been silent. The voice over narration was perhaps one of the most pointless things that I have ever heard. THEY ACUALLY SAID WHAY WAS HAPPENING ON SCREEN WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING. Why would you do that? Do they think the audience is so dumb that they can�t comprehend that the Spartans have won a battle when not a single one of them has died and they are piling up the corpses of their enemy? Beyond that, the actor who was chosen to be the narrator had absolutely no charisma in his delivery. It was stale and flat. An unforgivable sin when you are including voice over in a movie. I sure miss the days of Bogart.
By reading a chunk of this you might gather that I hated the film. I in fact thoroughly enjoyed it. There is a reason that this occurred though. I knew what I was getting into and was prepared for it. I have no faith in Zack Snyder as a storyteller. Zero. He has no idea how to coax a good performance from an actor or how to tell a story. He does however have a certain amazing ability at making spectacular action. I went in wanting to see raw gruesome violence for 2 hours and not have to have my mind work at all and I got exactly what I wanted. In fact, when this DVD comes out I will be there on opening day to buy it and I guarantee you that I shall watch the movie skipping from action scene to action scene many times. This film truly had the most inventively filmed action I have seen in a long time and the look of the film truly was amazing. If this is what intrigues you, go see this on the big screen. I promise you will not be disappointed.
Epilogue
Alan Moore�s, "Watchmen" is the greatest work in the history of comic books. It is a truly adult tale that elevated the art of comic books to a new height. It is not only a great piece of comic fiction, but Time magazine declared it one of the 100 best works of fiction of the twentieth century. This amazing deconstruction of the superhero mythology is a fantastic story that combines elements of Film Noir, Science Fiction, Politics, Authority and Theology. Zack Snyder, the director of "300", and the man with no storytelling capabilities is slated to direct this film next. I wish I could get excited about this, however, this is not the mist visually demanding comic book. "Watchmen" is the most intellectually demanding one. I wish Zack Snyder the best of luck because I truly do want to see a great retelling of "Watchmen", but I am very nervous and pessimistic with the reigns to this classic in his hands.
--Mr. Blaine
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