“Come and get them” — Review
Saturday, March 17th, 2007
Warning: spoilers abound in this post. Many of the pictures will open in a larger size if you click on them.
I was apprehensive before seeing 300 last night, a little worried about the level of violence. I can tell you right now that the movie is ulta-violent but for me not in a horrifying way with very few exceptions. During the entire two-hour film I averted my eyes twice, as I recall — in both cases when someone on-screen was having one of their eyes more than averted, if you get my stabby drift.
Ultra-violent, yes… but. I loved this film, the theme, the characters, the story, the soundtrack, the cinematography, the production design, everything. It was everything you’d want a comic book war story to be, beautiful, bloody and glorious.
The movie is a retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. In this famous conflict of Greeks versus Persians, 300 Spartan warriors stood as a rearguard to allow the greater bulk of a Greek army to retreat. They were doomed, and knew it, and their warrior ethic allowed them to rejoice in this literal battle to the death.
The movie itself is not hugely historically accurate as it itself it based on a comic book graphic novel by Frank Miller, best known for Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It’s immediately obvious how much it resembles a comic, in the way the scenes were laid out. In fact, after doing a little web-hunting for some pictures with which to illustrate this review, I came across a blog which shows movie stills side-by-side with the graphic novel. They did not need to storyboard much of the film, that’s for sure. (The link to this blog appears at the end of my review.)
The film is shot in a very desaturated way, much in sepias and grays, with a graininess to the film stock. At the beginning I found this distracting, wondering if the effect would only be used during the opening backstory scenes, but after it continued I sat back and enjoyed it. The effect again emphacized the comic bookishness of the movie. Here is an example of a typical scene before the battle begins:
You can see how washed out the colors are in this picture of King Leonidas and Queen Gorgo, yet in a odd way how crisp the edges are. It’s quite a marvelous effect visually as well as allowing me to enjoy the before-mentioned ultra-violence without viscerally feeling it to be too real. The production design was beautiful, which is at least partially attributable to being shot almost entirely in blue screen as shown here:
In the early part of the film there is a lot of voiceover and on-screen discussion about what it is to be a Spartan male, trained since birth to be the ultimate warrior with an unbreakable code of honor and unshakable loyalty to his comrade in arms. After Leonidas figures out a way to skirt Spartan law and he and his 300 warriors trot off to hold the “Hot Gateway”, the film switches back and forth between their mythic battle and Gorgo’s efforts back home to engage the rest of the Spartan army to support the small force. The Gorgo parts, although containing the bulk of the boobie shots tossed into the film, honestly did not lend much to the plot in my opinion. Her moment of personal revenge though — ah, that was a good scene, which had me choking back applause. You go, girl!
I’m not much one to have more than an aesthetic interest in women’s breasts anyway. As a heterosexual female, this film was a dream of highly muscled, beautiful men dashing about in nothing but helmets, cloaks, loincloths and greaves to protect their shins and knees. The actors were trained for six months to get in shape and by Ares, did it show. Hubba hubba — Nice. Arms. I am not talking about the thrusting spears.
Ahem.
To complete the retelling of the plot, in a nutshell the Spartans successfully battled the Persians’ huge army — led by Xerxes — for three days before being betrayed and surrounded. Xerxes repeatedly offers the kingship of all of Greece to Leonidas for a token of respect, a bit of earth, some water, and kneeling to him as a god. Leonidas tells him repeatedly to fuck off and all but one on the White Hat side dies. The end.
So what enthralled me most about this film were the characters and the imagery. The characters were quite cliche — we had the Noble Unbendingly Honorable Yet Loves His Wife and Son Ruler; his Faithful Second-in-Command; his Son Who Has a Bullseye Painted On His Back; the Hotshot Cowboy Best Friend of the Son; the Devoted Wife Who Will Do Anything To Save Her King/Husband; the Sneaky Politician; the Deformed Traitor; and the Crazed Loon Opponent, aka Xerxes. Yet despite this I enjoyed the way the actors portrayed these characters so distinctively with some real depth.
Xerxes is a really intriguing character. Through the film, the Persians are depicted as extremely decadent and cruel, whipping slaves left and right, leading chained mutants up to fight, having sexy slavegirls licking the Deformed Traitor’s hump, et cetera. Check out Xerxes being carried up to talk to Leonidas for the first time:
He is portrayed as being scarily androgynous, with a deep melodic oily voice, and roughly eight feet tall. He’s highly creepy and absolutely covered with gold. This picture gives a much better notion of the costume design:
The contrast to Noble Heroic handsomely bearded Leonidas could not have been greater.
(Nice arms, eh?)
The actor who played this part, Gerard Butler, is Scottish and his accent was obvious although not pronounced. His stentorian tones were perfect for statements like the title of this review, spoken when the demand was levied for the Spartans to lay down their arms.
On to the imagery of the film.
Here it was, as I’ve already stated a couple times, very comic booky. There were certain shots that were amazing though incredibly graphic, such as a tree to which the inhabitants of a village have been pinned to with arrows. When I first heard about this shot I thought there’d be people encircling the base of the tree, but no. Every single freaking branch, every inch of bark all the way up is covered with bodies. In another scene the Spartans are receiving Xerxes’ emissary, who boasts of spies watching them. Not any more, say the warriors, and suddenly you realize that the wall they have been shown building is boulders interspersed with bodies.
The battle scenes are also fantastically over-the-top. If you have seen Return of the King, recall the big battle at Pelleanor Fields outside Gondor and ramp it up about fivefold. There were set-pieces, such as the sky literally turning black with arrows, that left me awestruck.
They had a freaking war RHINOCEROUS for heaven’s sake, which had much too little screentime in my opinion — so little I can’t even google up a photo of it.
Historically one of the main strengths of Sparta’s army was fighting as a unit, creating the phalanx by overlapping shields. This was fascinating to watch, the shieldwall holding back the horde as the warriors thrust with their spears through the gaps and over the top. The choreography in the film was amazing, the shield line dropping for a second so the first and second line could thrust and then snapping back into position as a new set of attackers came up. There was a lot of gore, of course, slow-motion blood droplets flying and speartips protruding through enemy backs. I found it beautiful in a way though — again the comic book effect — rather than Sam Peckinpah horrific. There also was a certain amount of physically impossible leaping about and twirling although, thank the gods, no Matrix-style bullet time effects or hugely exaggerated wirework.
The phalanx also played a part in another set-piece that struck me, when the Spartans use their shields to undertake a little cliff disposal of a group of enemies:
There is also a number of individual combat scenes, during which I, as usual, sat muttering “don’t get flanked, never get flanked.” Stab, slash, hack, a leg goes flying, a head goes tumbling, one or two of the noble Spartans get killed and hundred of masked Persians die. They were gorgeous as battle scenes go, beautifully choreographed dances of death. They also really pissed Xerxes off.
For the final time, he approaches Leonidas and the remaining Spartans, on his ornate portable throne platform. The King is standing in front of a hedgehog shape of shields and bristling spears. “Drop your arms and kneel,” Xerxes demands. “We will let you live and you will be King of Greece if you only kneel.” Leonidas slowly takes his helmet off and it falls. So weary you can almost taste it, he slowly removes his shield from his shoulder and it joins the helmet. He still holds his spear… then the picture shifts to ground level and the spear falls into view, shuddering as it hits. As if the weight of the world is on his shoulders he looks down and slowly kneels, leaning prostrate with his face in the dirt. Xerxes looks satisfied until suddenly Leonidas surges to his feet, spear in hand, and casts it directly at his face. Flinching, Xerxes avoids all but a slash on his cheek, his blood being spilt as the Spartan king has promised. Roaring like an animal, Leonidas and his remaining warriors begin to fight again, until an absolute torrent of arrows pins them all to the ground.
…and there their story ends, says the narrator, the single wounded Spartan soldier who survived, sent back to tell the tale of their heroism. As he tells the end of his tale the scene pulls back to reveal the final army sent to confront and defeat Xerxes: not 300 men this time but instead 10,000 strong, at the Battle of Plataea.