Hardbody heroics: Comic book meets cgi in super-stylized, ha

Hardbody heroics: Comic book meets cgi in super-stylized, hand-to-spear carnage of the Battle of Thermopylae


JOHN GRIFFIN, The Gazette
Published: Friday, March 09, 2007
300

Rating 3

Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Rodrigo Santoro

Playing at: Angrignon, Brossard, Cavendish, Colossus, Cote des Neiges, Deux Montagnes, Kirkland, Lacordaire, Marche Central, Paramount, Paramount Imax, Sources, Spheretech, StarCite, Taschereau cinemas. For French version, see Page D2.

Parents' guide: wall-to-wall graphic novel violence, some sex and partial nudity.

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Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 is boldly and bloodily brought to life in Zack Snyder's hyper-violent CGI action film, made right here in Montreal.

Think Sin City in colour and let your fanboy mind drift back to familiar events in 480 BC.

We are in Greece - the city-state of Sparta to be precise - and girding our tough Spartan-guy loins for a suicide encounter with Persian god-king Xerxes and his invasion army of 250,000 men, rhinos, elephants and drooling giants. The Spartan elite force numbers exactly 300. Not even Vegas will take those odds.

Historically, we are witnessing the Battle of Thermopylae, one of the most heroic last stands ever recorded. By the time the 300 are finally cut down three days later, they have slaughtered a ridiculous number of their foes, undermined their confidence, made the freakish Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) question his own divinity, given the other Greeks time to get their game plan together, and been forever immortalized in story, song and the Oxford English dictionary.

As might be supposed, these were no ordinary soldiers. Taken from their mothers at an early age, they were intensively trained in the art of ultra-violence and not being girly boys.

"No retreat, no surrender" works for these hardbodies as well as it did in the Bruce Springsteen anthem, and the 300 who march with Gerard Butler's fearless warrior King Leonidas to thwart the invaders are under no illusions about their fate. They welcome it. It's an East/West thing.

Miller's 1998 comic has been faithfully, painstakingly rendered in three dimensions against bluescreen backdrops in Montreal studios, then brought to super-stylized visual reality in computer shops like the Hybride studio in the Laurentians. Fans and gorehounds will eat it up. Others, not so much.

Perhaps that's why precious few females attended Monday's premiere, but a whole lot of guys turned out. They were not there for moments of intimacy between the king and his brave queen (lovely Lena Headey, in an ocean of testosterone), though they might have liked the writhing slave-girl oracle in her see-through gauze ensemble.

No, they had come for hand-to-spear carnage and awesomely executed battlefield encounters, fantasical creatures and human freaks, a black rain of arrows and the noble stand of ripped warriors against insurmountable lunatic odds. They'd come for comic-book reality. Snyder, his buff cast and the genius Montreal crew and technicians gave them exactly what they wanted.

jgriffin@thegazette.canwest.com

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2007


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