300 VS. 1 (ME)

Action movie not as great as the Internet would have you believe

EVAN JOHNSON STAFF

COURTESY OF WARNER BROS.

Stuffed to bursting with macho pomposity, Zach Snyder’s 300, based slavishly on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name about the famed battle of Thermopyle, manages to remain mildly entertaining for about a third of its two-hour running time. Eschewing historical accuracy for a simplistic adolescent worldview, the film follows hunky Spartan King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) as he leads his titular 300 well-toned warriors through the euphemistically named but still anally evocative “hot gates,” a tight mountain pass in which the numerical advantage of the amassed hundreds of billions of invading Persians will count for nothing. Meanwhile, back home, Leonidas’ wife Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) attempts to stave off unctuous sleaze-bag Theron (Dominic West) and his sadistic politico-sexual come-ons.

Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), Persian king and self-proclaimed god (tsk tsk), is an effeminate and heavily-accessorized 10-foot-tall drama queen, so naturally his one-on-one encounters with Leonidas provide most of 300’s character-based delights, which are few and far between. The visuals, which I had assumed would be the film’s saving grace, are more often than not dreary and uninspired, though interspersed throughout are seven or eight digital-composite tableau images that are dramatic and (yes, damnit) somewhat artful. Also striking is the ashen musculature of the abs on the Spartan warriors, these copper midriffs being the focal point of a good portion of the shots.

I would have liked 300 to have worn its homoeroticism even more on its sleeve, but I suppose, given the film’s target demographic of Internet “fanboys,” that would spell box-office disaster. The Jacques-Louis David painting “Leonides at Thermopyle,” for example, envisions that Spartan king and his warriors as a band of rag-tag fairies, prancing around in the buff with frilly hats while their tiny, flaccid penises dangle freely without fear of castration. Now that’s a vision I can get behind! It’s too bad that 300’s three hundred peni are held so tightly under wraps in their snug, mud-brown speedos: I bet those tumescent Spartan cannons are quite a sight, especially after a long, hard battle.

This lack of homoerotic conviction wouldn’t be particularly troubling or, for that matter, conspicuous, if it weren’t for the film’s myopic vision of humanity, which generally equates disease, deformity, lesbianism and brown skin with shiftiness and decadent moral decay. To their credit, I doubt Miller and Snyder are consciously attempting to scare decent white people about threats of contamination from deformed lesbian foreigners; it simply “happens” to be the case that the film’s few deformed characters are not to be trusted.

Anyway, most of 300’s “socially insensitive” and “politically incorrect” aspects I could begrudgingly forgive (as I could with the rather more entertaining Sin City), if they weren’t symptoms of a much larger problem: it’s too stupid to be really entertaining. Before you cry foul and call me arrogant or snobby (though both are perfectly accurate descriptors), I don’t mean to say that you are stupid for liking it. Many bright viewers will no doubt find something to appreciate, somehow, but it won’t be the dialogue, which is awful, or the characters, which don’t exist. It might well be the “trippiness” of the “crazy” visuals, but unless you’re super stoned (which does help, kids), said visuals fail to deliver much to chew on, despite occasional glimmers of beauty.

That leaves the action, which does manage some moments of excitement, but for a peacenik like me goes on far too long and does so far too monotonously. I’m in danger of doing that myself here, so in the hopes of ruining the film for readers who have yet to see it, I’ll close with a tasty, plot-spoiling tidbit: they all die.