Movie Review: 300

Given that I usually enjoy the "titanic ancient battle" genre in general, I should technically love this film.

Why do I not, then?

The best I can describe it is that someone offers you a delicious steak sandwich. You bite into it and the bread is soft and fluffy, but the meat feels and tastes alarmingly like wet cardboard liberated from a tramp's living quarters.

300 is the wet cardboard of ancient battle movies. It's just bland, dull, predictable, brainless and above all fake. To sum this up, let me break it down into sections.


Presentation

The presentation is my least favourite part of the film - I don't think a single shot in the film was captured without the aid of CGI, if not completely constructed by CGI. It just sucks.

Even the scenes in which Leonidas (Gerard Butler) strides around Sparta all look like they were created completely by a computer. The simplest sets look like they've been airbrushed and edited and CGI'd to within an inch of their lives as opposed to being built of something real.

We see valleys, seas, hills, trees, all with lense effects and filters and virtual graphics. Even the Spartans themselves are created apparently out of a plastic mould, all walking around with the same chiselled granite torsos.

I wonder how much CGI was performed on the main cast too. One unintentionally hilarious moment, I paused because something didn't seem quite right about the lighting on the few characters stood in the foreground.

When I looked closer, their heads seemed to be shaded in differently to their perfect physiques. It was like a competently performed photoshop, but one that looks stupid nonetheless.

This is to ignore the dreadful battle scenes and the Persian hordes. If the Spartans come out of plastic moulds, the Persians must come off of a freaking mass production line.

There are about 3 types of Persian soldier in this film: Masked Man With Turban, Masked Man Without Turban and Immortals (Masked Men In Dark Clothing).

These faceless antagonists run at the Spartans like sausages leaping into a meat grinder. They exist merely to be eviscerated in slow-mo, fast-mo, in-between-mo and collapse in ridiculous sprays of unconvincing blood.

Now I'm aware that the film is hardly meant to go for realism (seeing as it depicts oracles as monsters and delights in other similar silliness), but the fight scenes are really a highlight of the CGI bullcrap.

Remember how I said Gladiator looked real, because the effects are real? Here is the opposite.

Typical combat scene: Identikit Persian #45409 charges in, gets hit by sword, does a 360 degrees backflip with CGI blood going everywhere (the "blood" is all perfectly spherical and never hits the ground, even when about 40 guys are beings stabbed) and then makes a landing that would be shunned at the Olympics.

Making every combat scene in a whole movie boring is actually quite an impressive feat, so I salute the effects team there. Perhaps if the film wasn't structured entirely around fighting it would be forgivable, but since that's the selling point AND the narrative of the film, having crap action sequences is quite embarrassing.

If you love films where not a single shot actually looks plausible in any way, you'll love this picture.

Story

So this movie is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel "300". If you've watched Sin City, you might be lured into thinking that 300 would have similar levels of weirdness and complexity. Sadly not.

No, this film is all about MANLY BELLOWING and MANLY SHOUTING and MANLINESS and MANLINESS THAT'S A BIT HOMOSEXUAL and not a lot else.

"Spartan" is used as a replacement for the word "badass", and is overused so much ("He kept his Spartan reserve", "We are Spartans!") that it's quite comical.

The Persian army is not elaborated on in any detail besides how evil they are. Which increases with every scene. Apparently the Persians don't just execute men, they execute them with obese disfigured guys with huge blades for arms. And they have pseudo-zombies as troops. Riiiiiight.

Sometimes the film tries to pretend that it's a little clever and knows about tactics. Leonidas repeatedly mentions the importance of a good Phalanx formation. This is then followed by the battle scene showing Spartans just wading in with no order at all, somehow striking down 4000 Persians each with a flick of the wrist because the script demands it.

Unlike in Gladiator, where the death of major characters feels sad and poignant, I found myself not giving a hoot about Leonidas' fate, or the fate of his men, because they're all such airheaded macho stereotypes that you could just replace them all with Arnold Schwarznegger. About the most deep exploration of emotions in this film is a closeup of someone's eyes...that's it.

The rest of the movie boils down to a silly, predictable tale of senate conspiracy, like a low-rent rip off of Roman politics. Oh, and boobs. We get to see boobs several times, but somehow even these have suspicious hints of CGI about them and fail to be interesting.

Overall rating: 2/5

When your film is about fighting and passion but fails at both, you know that you've done something wrong somewhere along the line.

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