nixsight

“300″ was big fun. And I learnt a lot. I learnt that my ancestors were apparently Scottish (and, occassionally, from the North of England), and that they had TB innoculations a long time before everyone else. And I learnt that everyone in the olden days was not only primitive and cruel, but also utterly mad. But then, I kind of already knew all that, even if a lot of the people blogging about this movie have chosen to forget about it.

There’s a lot of negative stuff to say about it. It’s often stupid in the most annoying of ways, and it’s clear that Zack Snyder loved the source material just a little bit too much, because there are moments of wank that have transferred direct from the comic, that really stood out as silly on the screen… mainly in the dialogue department. This isn’t surprising… Frank Miller has never been a particularly subtle writer, and even at his best, he’s heavily influenced by pulpy, poppy delivery, which seemed cooler in 90s comics then it ever could in 2007 audio. There’s also the issue, of course, that the real Spartans were apparently so laconic and casually macho that much of what they said back then would probably sound desperately corny, “cool” and vaguely “Top Gun” homoerotic even without Miller’s touch.

The movie is also gratuitously sensuous… no visual or sequence is left untouched by Snyder’s love affair with the original, and although the odd bit of slo-mo is welcome so that you can take in the work that’s gone into an image, there is way too much of it here. The temptation is to write it off as a Marenghian failure (“The episodes were running up to 8 minutes under. The only way to stretch them out was with slow-motion. And, we, tried to keep the slow-motion away from the dialogue as much as possible, but anything without dialogue was considered for slow-motion.”) but I think in a lot of cases it was actually Snyder’s desire to pick out the references to the original for the viewer. There were a few extended pieces of fragmented slo-mo during the battles that went on way too long, giving the impression that the film was stuttering, and while it looks like a new, jump-cut take on The Matrix’s bullet-time battles, it seems more likely that it’s done as homage to Miller. Miller’s only really consistent strength is his understanding of motion in comics, his innate ability to pick out the moments in a sequence of events that will deliver the most punch, but also deliver the most consistently fluid storytelling, and a good Miller punch-up or action sequence is still a joy to behold. But where the comics are perfectly in tune with Scott McCloud’s idea that in comics, time passes and stories are told in the space between the panels, then 300 the movie subverts, or perverts it. I haven’t got the issues in front of me, but I suspect that slowing down of time to almost freeze-frame parts of the fights are consistent with key panels in the books.

So yes, the movie has flaws, and if you don’t enjoy bombastic, chest-beating action, it won’t matter a damn that the movie is so pretty that it starts to hurt your eyes. But as far as thrills, spills (yes, and chills!) go, it doesn’t waste the money you put down for the tickets. The shock-and-awe effect keeps rising, and the action and violence keeps building like a particularly slick and bloody extra-long music video. Which sometimes is just what I’m in the mood for.

What I find amazing, but I suppose deep down I’m not all that surprised about, though, is the amount people are reading into it. I read yesterday that this is the sort of film that Hitler would have enjoyed. And yeah, there’s some truth in that… Hitler probably would have enjoyed a film about violence and glory, in which someone other than the Germans got beaten… but that’s not what the blogger was implying, of course. They were suggesting that the film is somehow a Nazi film (and not that Hitler liked watching well oiled, dirty men, kill and maim people from other lands and then manfully slap each other’s arses.), and that is just such lazy, watery and reactionary logic, it hurts.

The main reason it’s lazy is that, while the film probably has a massive amount of historical innacurracy in it, the things that keep getting picked out as reasons why the film is immoral, racist or fascistic are pretty much the things that are actually a matter of historical record.

The Spartans did practice a primitive form of eugenics… it’s shown as a pretty cruel practice in the movie, in fact. And it’s not unsurprising… the Spartans were a self-proclaimed military race, so of course they were all about the unnatural selection.

300 Spartans and their allies did hold off the massive Persian army for a couple of days at the pass of Thermopylae, and their success in this wasn’t, as many pundits have suggested, a chest-beating exaggeration shown by Hollywood to encourage the idea that if a bunch of blokes are hardcore and obnoxious and gung-ho enough, they can beat enormous odds; it’s actually a fairly simple piece of strategic thinking: A small number of soldiers can hold fast against overwhelming numbers if fighting in an enclosed space that funnels the enemy to a thinner, weaker point, in this case a pass between two rock faces, but history has shown that it stands for bridges and the like as well. I could be wrong, but I think the battle portrayed is generally considered to be one of the more important moments of strategic military thinking in history, and certainly is culturally of note.

I can see how people have read so much into the film… as someone at the Engine suggested, a narrative that is so ridiculously broad, sweeping and simplistic can easily have any viewpoint mapped onto it. But I don’t buy this as deliberate Republican or Neo-Con propoganda… the inferences are too confusing. You can read the crusading, glory seeking and stubborn Leonidas fighting the combined might of foreign masses intent on taking his people’s liberty as an allegory for George Bush Jr and his Holy Warring, or the NRA against the liberals who want to take their guns. The problem is, if you’re looking, it’s just as easy to see the Spartan’s heroic defense of their country’s borders against an ideologically opposed invading nation made up of hundreds of different races, and using the pseudo-guerilla tactics of exploiting their country’s own landscape against the enemy, as a glorification of the Taliban’s efforts in Afghanistan, or Saddam Hussein’s eternal belief that he was righteous in his cause, even till death. The 300 are on a suicide mission based on causing the most mayhem and terror possible with the deaths of a few dedicated men, and that sounds to me like a metaphor for the justified use of suicide bombing. The Persians just send wave against wave of hapless soldiers to die against a glorious group of soldiers who know that their reward for dying well lies in the next world, and as such seem impossible to beat, and if that doesn’t sound like current US foreign policy in the Middle East, I don’t know what does. It could play as Conservative propoganda, but with a little bit of jiggling, it’d serve just as well as Islamic fundamentalist recruitment material.

War can be pretty complicated, but at the same time, it tends to follow roughly the same broad themes. Both sides think they are righteous… the invaders have often thought that they are bringing civilisation to the natives, and the natives are often only on the receiving end because they didn’t attack first. Or because they did. Frank Miller isn’t ever particularly subtle in his delivery, but that means he’s fairly well equipped to deal with stuff like noir murder and ancient war. His Spartans are at least portrayed as arrogant arseholes… you’re kind of given the impression that everyone was just more of a dick back then, and that in war, posturing and low cunning are a benefit, and honour an idea that means different things to different races, but that all of them make claim to.

So, yeah, if you want to hate “300″, do so because it’s stupid, or gratuitious, or too loud, or paced unevenly. But don’t apply complex and loathsome intentions to it that just aren’t there, because frankly, it’s like taking a pop at the retarded kid in the corner… even if you give them a kicking, it’ll only make you look dumber and meaner than they are.