300 Gets Official From Berlin

300 Gets Official From Berlin


CanMag.com


February 15, 2007


by Ryan Parsons



You know you are confident when you let critics/audiences check out a finished film approximately a month before its release. Warner Bros continues to keep 300 on the top of our minds with new media updates and (now) official screening reports.

Both Variety and HollywoodReporter have encountered 300 with both publications now inspired to conjure their own 'beautiful deaths.'

Variety
The Spartans fight to the last manly man in "300," a blustery, bombastic, visually arresting account of the Battle of Thermopylae as channeled through the rabid imagination of graphic novelist Frank Miller. Rendered by director Zack Snyder in a manner very similar to last year's Miller adaptation "Sin City," except in full color, this is a steroid-fueled fever dream about self-realization through extreme violence. In the larger picture, the cartoonish history lesson inescapably describes a monumental East vs. West conflagration, which might be greeted with muted enthusiasm in the Middle East. Action addicts in general and carnivorous fanboys in particular will chow down on this bloody feast.

THR
The Frank Miller experience continues in "300." This is the second movie to transfer a muscular story and visuals from a Miller graphic novel to the screen. Instead of the neo-noir, pulp-fiction theater of cruelty in the Robert Rodriguez's 2005 film "Sin City," "300" dives into the mythology of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Here, according to the graphic novel by Miller and Lynn Varley, 300 Spartan warriors went up against the barbarous hordes of the Persian god-king Xerxes and died valiantly defending Greek notions of freedom and justice.





http://www.canmag.com/nw/6766-300-berlin-reviews