Adapted from Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same name, "300" is a fantasy redux of the Battle of Thermopylae, 480 B.C., in which 300 Spartans made a legendary last stand against the invading Persians and their emperor, Xerxes. A self-proclaimed God, Xerxes commanded an army estimated at over 2.6 million and was known for a murderous rage; legend has it that when Xerxes' attempt to bridge the Hellespont was thwarted by storms, the emperor beheaded the engineers in charge of the project and ordered that the water literally be whipped and that chains be tossed in as a symbol of defiance.
Shrewdly funneling the Persians into a narrow pass ("Thermopylae" translates from the Greek as "the Hot Gates"), the hardy Spartan contingent was able to incur massively disproportionate losses on the side of the Persians. Though all 300 were eventually killed when a traitor revealed to the Persians a path around the choke point, the Battle of Thermopylae set the stage for the eventual defeat of Xerxes in the Battles at Salamis and Plataea.
Gerard Butler ("The Phantom of the Opera") stars in the film as Leonidas, an endearingly bellicose grunt-King who dreams of a "beautiful death" and leads his men in rousing chants of "Hoo-ah!!" The movie is awash with an absurd kind of frat-boy machismo: Every soldier is typically topless and chiseled to statuesque perfection; Spartan hoplites lock shields and press forward like linebackers. "300" revels in a near-pornographic excess of violence replete with slow-motion beheadings, battlefield duels set to crunching guitar riffs and barricades of which enemy corpses are the mortar. The film is gory in the extreme, and yet the carnage is so incessantly over-the-top that audience members are unlikely to be really offended by this wacky spectacle.
"300," which debuted this past weekend to the tune of $70 million, takes aim at the golden consumer demographic of 20-year-old males, and basically delivers popcorn fun and bombastic fight scenes as expected. In the aftermath of such films as "The Lord of the Rings," "Kingdom of Heaven" and "Troy," however, it's hard to get worked up over scenes of large groups of men running into each other. "300" does epic battles as well as any film, but it's nothing we haven't seen before.
Fans of "Sin City" (also adapted from a Miller graphic novel) will be familiar with what "300" has to offer visually. Both films were shot in front of a green screen so as to appropriate a comic-book aesthetic. "300" features a burnished-bronze tone remarkably faithful to the original work but which can feel sterile in its onscreen translation. And if the sight of a thousand arrows raining down isn't enough to convey the movie's boyish sensibilities, the makers of "300" have even taken pains to ensure that the animals in the film are as cartoonish on the silver screen as they are in the comic book; the elephants in "300" are 40 feet tall and the wolves have red eyes.
Director Zack Snyder ("Dawn of the Dead") has said in interviews that he simply wanted to "make a movie that is a ride," and it is in light of the film's simple-minded ambitions that cultural criticism seems misguided. Yes, the Persians are depicted in "300" as cultish, effeminate and basically evil; the movie also features hunchbacks, lepers, rhinos, an ogre with blades for hands and opens to a scene of Spartans literally throwing babies off a cliff. Anyone who reads anything malicious or even calculated into "300" risks falling into P.C. self-parody. The film may be sensationalist, but it's also harmless.