DVD Tuesday: 300 Spartans at your door
300 courtesy Warner Home Video
DVD Tuesday: 300 divided critics and united moviegoers with its stylized vision of free men standing down monsters.
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300
was exhibit "A" when Variety editor Peter Bart launched a spiteful screed against elitist critics earlier this year. Critics lambasted
300 and audiences flocked to see it. Bart concluded, "filmgoers seem to be having a great time at the multiplexes critics, by contrast, may be shopping around for a new line of work." Please: popular isn't always good. But it's not always bad, either -- I loved
300, and it's this week's DVD Tuesday pick. So there.
A highly stylized blend of CGI and live action,
300 is based on graphic novelist Frank Miller's bloody, visceral retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, during which vastly outnumbered troops from a coalition of Greek city states -- led by a core group of 300 Spartan soldiers commanded by King Leonidas -- held off Persian king Xerxes the Great's massive, armed-to-the-teeth forces for three full days at a narrow pass overlooking the Aegean Sea. The battle ended when a traitor betrayed the one weakness of the Greek warriors' position.
Virtually all the film's backgrounds are computer generated; the actors were shot against a green screen and com posited into imaginary rooms and landscapes. Rather than try to gloss over the artificiality, director
Zack Snyder highlights it, and the resulting imagery has a vibrant, pulpy energy and impact. Is the film painstakingly accurate history? No. Is it hugely entertaining and even moving? You bet.
And for all the chiseled flesh on display, 300's stars are anything but a collection of beefcake pin-ups (though you used to have to visit a gay go-go bar to see so many men in leather underpants): They include Scottish theater actor
Gerard Butler as Leonidas, English
Dominic West (of
The Wire), Australian
David Wenham and a slew of less well-known but equally accomplished (mostly UK) actors, and they lend a certain grace and depth to the movie's clipped, epigrammatic dialogue. Some of which, by the way comes from existing historical records via Miller: Spartan training was designed to produce world-class fighting men who were also tersely eloquent, witness Leonidas' response to Xerxes' demand that the Spartans lay down their arms: "Come take them." Any screenwriter would be proud to have concocted such an eloquently belligerent, beautifully pared down comeback.
Miller's version of the story takes some liberties with history and stylizes the rest, larding the Persian troops with flat-out monsters (though Xerxes' legendary 10,000 Immortals are perfectly human, faces concealed behind scary masks) and making the traitor Ephialtes a grotesque hunchback. In the name of vividly visual storytelling, I say bring it on. There's a reason
300 opens with Dilios (Wenhan), Sparta's oral historian, declaiming the story of the young Leonidas and his youthful victory over a larger-than-life wolf: It puts you on notice that this is a
story, facts shaped and angled to a particular end. As to stripping Leonidas and his citizen-warriors down to their helmets, in scarlet capes, sandals and briefs, Miller and Snyder are hardly the first to evoke Spartan culture's muscular rigor through literal musculature. The monument at Thermopylae commemorating the Spartans'"triumphant defeat" depicts
Leonidas butt naked, as does French neoclassical painter Jean-Louis David's "
Leonidas at Thermopylae" Yes, everything old is nude again.
Things to consider:
How do you feel about hyperstylized movies like
Sin City or
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? Do dazzling, conspicuously artificial visuals detract from story and character?
What degree of accuracy do you think it's reasonable to expect from fiction films based on real events?
Is the power of a well-made movie to fix a particular version of reality in people's minds (think, for example, Oliver Stone's
JFK) dangerous?
300 has been characterized as both spirited defense of American presence in Iraq (Spartans as outnumbered American troops, taking a stand against barbaric terrorist hordes) or a critique (Spartans as Iraqi insurgents, taking a stand against better-armed foreign invaders). Do you buy either? Neither?
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! - Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
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Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
This week's new DVD releases
