Promotional poster
300, Zack Snyder, 2006, 117 mins
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"300" tells the story of how few brave and free men held against an overwhelmingly large army - but an army consisting of slaves. A Persian messenger comes to Sparta and threatens king Leonidas. He is killed for his mistake, and the Spartan king is now warned over the grave situation to come. He sees the necessity of action and travels with only 300 men -without waiting for the council's approval, as he knows they will take too long to come to a decision- to a narrow gap in some cliffs he knows the Persians will be traveling soon. There he will rule out the advantage of numbers that the Persians enjoy, and fight to the death if necessary. 300 is nothing but a shot of testosterone added some doping. It's a music video with just too many attempts at making something with a story that can be deep without getting any real focus. It's even more fascistic than Pan's Labyrinth and it does nothing to cover up the pro-Iraq-war-propaganda. It might have been better if the cut it down to the 30 minutes they battle accompanied by heavy metal, and nothing else. It's a travesty that Zack Snyder, the director, actually has to go out and say that the story shouldn't be taken seriously and his main project was getting Miller's drawings come to life. Film is a media - if it doesn't communicate what you want it to it means you screwed up. Now, there has been enough 300-bashing already, so I'll just cut down to the basic flaw of the movie; it doesn't take the difference of medias into consideration. It's the Da Vinci Code-syndrome all over again. The book is written with a film adaptation in mind - it sells phenomenally all over the globe. It should be so easy to get it on the big screen and squeeze the last cash and dignity out of the readers. But no. Books, comics, flicks - they all use different tools. Where as Miller's comic is mythological storytelling, Snyder's modern cinematic style just twists it into a worthless Fascist crap movie and all because Miller's work suddenly is put in another context. What went wrong, Snyder? The audience even laughed during the sex-scenes! And how did all the homo-erotic undertones pass you by? Your movie is a comedy, for crying out loud! Roy Lichtenstein's early art was all about taking cliché pop icons, putting them in a new context, and thus creating art. Zack Snyder goes the other way: he takes art and places it in a new context, thus making it banal pop culture. Snyder's next project seems to be Alan Moore's Watchmen. Hopefully he won't mess it up. 300 gets 2 points out of 6 for the visual flair; for make-up, battles and technical skill. It succeeds in converting Miller's drawings to film, but that is not as impressive as it would have been, had Sin City not been made. - Reviewed by Konstantin Sane |
