300 : Spartan Fever Dreams

300 : Spartan Fever Dreams





Mer (merrydeath) wrote,
@ 2006-12-24 08:02:00




I'd practically been wetting myself over the splendor and bombast of the previews, but dear Wiley's amusing review of 300 is making me uneasy, especially his speculations about what may or may not happen to the director's adaptation of Moore's The Watchmen later this year. Ugh:

This adaptation of Frank Miller's historically dubious, nationalistic, bloodbath-comic consists of pretty much one big slow motion battle scene. I think the title is the number of slowed-down spear impalings in the movie. You may not have known this, but the Persian king Xerxes I was evidently an 8 foot tall effeminate bald man of indeterminate, dusky ethnicity who was really into facial piercings. Also, the Persian army filled its ranks with giant troll-monsters and partied with anthropomorphic goats. To be fair, the director (who was on hand for an early morning Q&A) explained the deviation from historical fact by saying the film was like a 'Spartan fever dream'- that it was a mythologized version of the battle that might be retold to children to rouse them to fight themselves, and in fact the movie closes with the narration wrapping up as the end of a pre-battle speech. But this is really side stepping the truth, that the story is really Frank Miller's fever dream. One that exalts a completely militarized culture that practices eugenics, condescends neighboring Athenians as 'philosophers and boy lovers' and demonizes an enemy so alien and 'other' that some of them seem to actually be devolving into half-human half-animal bogeymen (and ninjas!). While I thought Gerard Butler has a very screen worthy presence in the film, no one is given much to say other than he-man posturing and cliche platitudes. The Spartan queen actually challenges us with the line "Freedom isn't Free" at one point, and you would have to be pretty dim not to see what Miller is getting at, especially with Persians as the enemy. I'll be interested to see how much director Snyder has internalized the politics of this movie when he starts filming Watchmen, the landmark Alan Moore comic from the 80's that couldn't be more polar opposite in either its politics or in the sublety of its execution. It's hard to predict, because what I remember of the comic version of 300 didn't go so far as to present the Persians as actual monsters, but I may have to re-read it.
The audience whooped and cried for joy at this movie. Maybe it will convince them to join the army. The only thing I liked about the film was its color palette. Oh, and the fact that the Toxic Avenger has a role as the genetically inferior Spartan who escaped from being thrown off a cliff at birth to betray the king. They should have given him his mop though, instead of a spear.

I really need to make it down to Harry's "Butt Numb A Thon" one of these years.



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