I saw
300 in theaters and basically got what I expected. All the previews were about the eye candy, the massive violence, and the bloodthirsty attitude, and that was indeed there, and indeed enjoyable, if you're a person who likes that sort of thing in your motion pictures. I do. What I didn't care as much for, and what's largely stuck in my memory, was the plot, the theme, the symbolism, and the ideology, most of which were stupid, puerile, misleading, and actively rabble-rousing, in the worst sort of demagogic way. As such, this review, partially written after I saw the film and finished up months later, gives a lower score and less favorable discussion than it would have if I'd finished it an hour after leaving the theater.
300, 2006
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 8
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 6
Replayability: 6
Overall: 4
Malaya and I were shocked that we didn't dig this one more. She actively disliked it at the time we saw it; I just found it tedious, overlong, and way too un-self critical. It was just a little too fanboy in execution, for my taste. Too posed, too fantastic, too dramatic, too preening. A lot of small penis complex going on, and mostly written from, and for, the mentality of about a 12 year old boy. I'd have loved it at that age myself, and probably up through 16 or so, even though I basically outgrew the moral simplicity and posing supremacy of this sort of comic book world by 12 or 13. By then I wanted more nuance and dynamic characters. I was bored by archetypal heroes and villains, since they simply don't exist in real life. My interest with fiction and psychoanalysis (not that I was aware of this on any conscious level in my teens) is in looking into the complexities and subtleties and dichotomies of character. Why do people do what they do, and how can that be countered or dealt with.
That's not what this film is about. That's the antithesis of this film's psychology. This movie is about bold, strong, muscular, honest, brave, heterosexual, Caucasian heroes battling nobly against impossible odds. Their enemy? Teeming legions of evil, effeminate, perverted, diseased, evil, scheming, treacherous, debased, filthy, cheating, brown-skinned, devil-worshipping savages. To call the plot and characterization cartoonish is both honest, and insulting to cartoons.
This film is essentially warporn, and for a certain mentality it's absolutely intoxicating. Not that everyone who enjoys this film is that kind of saggy, insecure supporter of a war they'd never in a million years dream of fighting in themselves, but that mentality is definitely attracted to this movie. Plenty of people just liked it because stuff "blowed up real good," to misuse the parlance. It's medieval war porn, and the metaphorical morning smell of napalm is sinus-clogging in its ever-presence.
The battle scenes are what got the attention and discussion and interest going in advance, and they're what most viewers took away with them, but they are essentially irrelevant to the plot. It's made clear pretty much from the beginning that the brave King and his loyal followers are going to die in their efforts to hold the gap. That's no tragedy, since the whole warrior death cult of their society glorifies that sort of action. The real plot and absurdity of the film comes in the court scheming, where the queen tries to rally support for the war effort from the lethargic and corrupt senate, the old men sitting safe and complacent behind the war their heroes are dying in. There's a traitor of course, and he's vile and despicable in every way, and he suffers a fanboy-pleasing death by knife, the tainted gold he took in bribes from the enemy spilling from his purse as he bleeds and dies his coward's death melodramatically on the floor of the senate. (Of course he'd be carrying the damning evidence with him at all times, and accept payment for his treason in funds he couldn't possibly spend in his homeland.)
The plot elements were topped by some ridiculously ahistorical speeches, all about Sparta's glorious freedom and how their sacrifices would provide a beacon of light in the world, etc. A clear (mythical) connection was forged between the freedom, politics, religion, etc of ancient Sparta and modern America, with obvious propagandistic parallels to our ongoing Iraqi War/Occupation. (It's gone on longer than WWII, you realize?)
I found these speeches absurd, even aside from my (somewhat mixed) feelings about past/present/future Middle Eastern conflicts. Sparta was far from free; citizenship was highly stratified and conditional, they owned slaves, women weren't full citizens, they notoriously (Hitler praised them) practiced eugenics, and the fact that the leader was
King Leonidas, and his chief defender (in the movie)
Queen Gorgo, should make pretty clear just how democratic was their society.
The really silly part of the speeches, as presented in the film, made it seem like there was some direct line between Sparta and modern Western democracies; as if they lit the fuse and we're the sizzling bomb of progress.
Sparta existed something like 3000 years ago, was ended by the expansion and consolidation of the Roman Empire, which in turn gave way to centuries and centuries of Christian theocracies, Moorish occupation, feudalism, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, etc. Only within the last couple of hundred years has the Western world known anything that could reasonably be described as "freedom" and that doesn't stem from anything the ancient Greeks did, other than in a very vague "principles of democracy" sort of way. Furthermore, when that's talked about, it's never the warlike, primitive Spartans who are cited; it's the more enlightened, intellectual, scholarly Athenians.
I'm far from an expert on ancient Greece and European history, and almost everything the film presented on that front stuck in my craw; I can only imagine the choking sensation experienced by actual historians. True, it's just a movie and not meant to be a serious take on history of culture or battlefield strategies, but the film presents this war fanboy material as thought it were factual, and pipes the rhetoric through the delicate lips of the hottie Queen.
Better yet, she delivers her speeches while decked out in one Caligula-worthy cosplay outfit after another, most of which are basically flowing bikini tops over slit-legged miniskirts. The queen also engages in lengthy, breast-baring scenes of intercourse with the king, walks around naked a few times, gets semi-raped by the traitor politician as she sort of agrees to screw him in exchange for him supporting her speech to the senate, etc.
There's not a woman in the film who isn't humiliated or raped or shown naked and helpless, and the one strong female (the queen) gets fucked from behind while resisting (on camera) while agreeing to much more sex that's not shown, and is then betrayed and humiliated by the revelation of her conduct in front of the entire senate. The other women in the film are writhing, naked, temple whores who are slobbered on by grotesquely-mutated pagan priests, and various mostly-naked, deformed and freakish concubines in the Sultan's harem.
I don't want to belabor the point, or make it sound like anyone who enjoyed the film is a simple-minded fool, but a great deal of the movie is designed to appeal to young males who operate on that level. I know, I was one, for a time. And sure, it can also be enjoyed on a more intelligent level, or just for the bloody eye candy and homoerotically-rippling, sweaty musculature, or as pure escapism without taking in any moral messages or ideology, but I think it's fairly obviously written with those points in mind. And that's why a movie that had such enjoyable violence and action and bloodletting gifted me with apathy at the time, an impression that, given months to ferment, has curdled to antipathy towards the film and the type of people it hoped to claim as fans and sway to its cause.
All that said, I do want to see it again on DVD at some point, to see if my reactions to it are the same the second time around, and just to enjoy the bloodporn and combat, even if I have to fast forward over the rest.
Labels: movie review, the 300
