I saw "300" Tuesday night. I sent this little report to a friend who asked about it, then decided to post it here on Wacco for anyone interested:
I thought it was worth seeing, but not great. It was worthwhile mostly because of its visual beauty (it was very faithful to the graphic novel). The critics are right in calling it a “guy movie”, because a lot of it is about battle action, which is well-filmed, but not enough by itself to make a movie worthwhile for me. They are also right in pointing out that, in spite of having brief scenes with a couple of sexy women, the movie is a gay guy’s paradise, with hundreds of buff studs running around in little more than sandals, leather jockstraps and capes.
For me, the worst flaw is the hypocrisy of casting the battle as the forces of freedom (the Spartans) against the forces of tyranny (the Persians). Casting the Spartans, who had slaves and treated their women as 2nd class citizens, as freedom fighters is propagandistic, ethnocentric bullshit with strong resonances with our country’s current nationalistic, militaristic bullshit. It reinforces my suspicion that ("300" writer/artist) Frank Miller is a bit of a right-winger.
Also, the movie was Hollywoodized in a couple of ways, partly to be true to some hokey aspects of Miller’s fictionalization of the story. For instance, some of the warriors in the battle are deformed to the point of being comic-bookish fanged monsters—realism is sacrificed for sensationalism. None of the Spartans have any noticeable body hair; they’re shaved (another sop to the gay guys, maybe, and/or to women?). The scene with the oracle is gratuitously sexualized. Christianisms sneaked in, as with a reference to “the Lord” and the line “Tonight we sleep in Hell!” Since when did ancient Spartans talk that kinda Christian jive? And, everybody in the movie mispronounced Leonidas (the accent is on the “on” and the “i” is short).
So anyway, if you want to enjoy some nicely composed and colored screen images and some rousing macho action, it’s fun. But it’s not profound by a long shot. I liked the graphic novel a little better, I think.
Dixon