Don’t wreck a good story with the truth
Warner Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Present 300 of the World’s Toughest vs. 1 Million Demented Easterners. Mayhem! Certain Death! CGI Blood by the Barrel! Step right up!
300 **
Directed by Snack Snyder
Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West, David Wenham and Rodrigo Santoro
US (2007) 117 min
Knock knock. Who’s there? The Spartans! The Spartans who? . . . THE SPARTANS!!!!
It’s true. The Spartans are back. All 300 of them with King Leonidas, Queen Gorgo, the Judas, Ephialtes, a hermaphrodite Xerxes with five (count them), five nose rings, war rhinos, deformed concubines, nipple-exposing oracles and plenty of digital Persian freaks. So come on down to Thermopylae and watch the bodies pile up. See a herd of digital Persian elephants fall from the cliffs to their doom, a chained giant decapitated, bomb-throwing Achaemenids in chain mail burkas, Greek soldiers in shiny bikinis and crimson capes and so many slow-motion blood spurts and sword thrusts you will personally track Peter Jackson down and spit in his face.
I heard 300, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, got a vigorous booing in Berlin, not by the movie-goers, but by the critics. Classicists have done their share of griping too. The Spartans weren’t really like that, they’ve warned, just in case we’d left our Herodotuses at home. So beefy and heroic, so freedom-loving? Tsk, tsk. They were worried we’d get the wrong impression, you see, so I can forgive them. No one mentioned anything about the capes though, not a single classicist, and I’d like to know for sure, before I buy one, if that’s what they really looked like.
But it was the Iranians who stole the show and metamorphosised the grousing campaign into slapstick. The Iranians were in a national uproar on Narouz, the Iranian New Year, when the film was released in Tehran. Do they have movie theatres in Tehran? I guess they do. It tarnished the finest pages in their history, they lamented. And what about that obese fellow with the razor-sharp flippers for hands? And their good king Xerxes in lipstick and eyeshadow? Pshaw! Pinned to the gills with effeminate beads? An uproar wasn’t exactly the word; they were scandalised and went to UNESCO with their complaints.
The only unanimously positive reception came from the citizens of modern day Sparta, three shepherds and their goats. They have expressed their gratitude to Frank Miller publicly with a promise to erect a statue of the cartoonist somewhere in Laconia.
Miller probably got a kick out of all this pooh-poohing. After all, it was only a comic. Graphic novels, they call them these days, but they’re still just comic books. A fairly big grouser himself, and usually reluctant to have his artistic vision spoiled by studio executives, Miller was overjoyed at Snyder’s work, as he had been with Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of his noir saga Sin City a year or two back. It was a spitting image of his memorial to the famous showdown at Thermopylae in 480BC – outlandish Persian savages getting the shit kicked out of them by a few noble Greeks in capes. The Justice League versus Lex Luthor. Pure comics.
Which explains why a movie like 300 works much better than Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Gibson never realised he’d been writing a comic book, and had been writing them for years. Think of how much better The Passion would have been with a few thousand horrible digital Jews, how much bloodier and agonising a crucifixion with a bluescreen Christ. It was director Snyder himself who admitted that the success of the film’s narrative device, which was his own idea, was due to the fact that Dilios, the narrator, was someone who wouldn’t ‘wreck a good story with truth’. And so that’s what we have with 300, a gigantic, surreal battle between superheroes and villains loosely based on historical events.
You know you are in comic book land from the very beginning when the first villain, a big, red-eyed animatronic wolf, stalks a seven-year-old King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) in the Spartan wilderness where he is undergoing his hellish Spartan military training. So by the time you see the Persian frigates tossing around on the Aegean like Viking longboats on the North Sea, or the rabid war rhino, or the pi?ce de r?sistance, the ridiculous, ten-foot, bead-festooned Xerxes, you have no right to complain, and should have walked out long before that.
Snyder arranged this whole fantasy with plenty of help from CGI, transforming a dusty Peloponnesian goat track into his bizarre oriental-hellenic circus where East clashes with West. Most of the scenes were just pasted from the comic book, Miller’s dialogue unmolested where possible. The undersaturated colours, gloomy blues and greys, were used to mimic the mood of the original.
The action was fairly relentless, interrupted by a necessary scene or two of court intrigue back in Sparta and a night of wholesome Persian debauchery. It is gripping, I suppose, for a while. At the end of the first day there are enough Persian corpses to erect a fairly sturdy seaside wall, by the second or third, enough for a lighthouse, or a modest garrison. The Persians keep coming, all sorts of them, all in vain, the Spartans keep thrusting them back and building new site-specific architecture. All the blood spurting is comic ketchup, every sword thrust a protracted ballet. Leonidas couldn’t have barked or rolled his eyes half as well as Butler, who, rumour has it, was pumping weights in between scenes just to sustain his menacing bulk.
In the end, the Spartans fared much better than Mel Gibson’s Mayans. A largely repulsive group, historically, at Snyder’s Thermopylae they are shown in the best possible light, invincible warriors defending their honour and their land, appropriately one-dimensional. There is no mention of slavery – the vast majority of the populace were serfs and not even ‘Spartans’ – and hardly any mention of the queerer Spartan habits, such as flogging (women and men being more or less equal in Sparta, both indulged in this odd strength-building activity) and ritualised pederasty, though we do catch a glimpse of one of their favourite pastimes, exposing substandard infants on mountainsides.
Standing outside the K-Cineplex afterwards, I was feeling very unmanly. Huddling together in tense, suspicious groups were male teenage Cypriots, discussing God knows what, but I just knew from the tangible testosterone levels that they were wondering where they might find some Persians to round up and slaughter.
It was the same feeling we used to have after a Rambo or Karate Kid matinee, and did little about. In any case, I think King Leonidas would have been satisfied with 300 and definitely would have given the royal stamp to his descendents’ decision to put up that statue of Frank Miller.
