300

The New York Sun, March 9, 2007

Hades, the ancients warned us, is dreary, morose, and subdued, its only pleasure a certain resigned tranquility. However, once news of Zack Snyder's "300," an account of the battle of Thermopylae, reaches the shades of the Spartan dead, even that sad calm will be gone. There will be shouts of rage, muttered, if laconic, threats and most ominous of all, the sound of swords being unsheathed as the finest fighting men of all time set off to hunt down Mr. Snyder, this son-of-a-Helot who should have stuck to the zombies he handled so well in "Dawn of the Dead."

"300" marks the second time the work of comic book maestro Frank Miller has been brought directly to the big screen. The first, 2005's "Sin City," a flawed masterpiece jointly directed by Mr. Miller and Robert Rodriguez, was undercut by poor plotting and incoherent showiness, yet redeemed by a wild visual élan. If "Sin City" was a flawed masterpiece, "300" is just flawed.

For that, much of the blame must lie with Mr. Miller himself. Best known for the way in which his "The Dark Knight Returns" revived DC's flagging "Batman" franchise, he is an artist most effective within genres characterized by excess and self-caricature. "Sin City," an inspired, loopy riff on hard-boiled fiction and film noir, worked in ways that "300," based on real events, never could.

It's telling that Mr. Snyder has described Mr. Miller's "300" as an attempt to turn history into mythology — telling because it reveals how little he understands what Thermopylae means. Fearless, implacable Leonidas already is myth, legend, and dream: He has been since those days in 480 B.C. when he, his 300 Spartans and a few thousand soldiers drawn from other Greek states, took on the vast army (numbering at least 250,000, though other estimates are far higher) assembled by the Persian king Xerxes to invade and subjugate Greece. In the end, Leonidas's tiny force was overwhelmed, but his heroic stand not only helped inspire the Greek victories that followed, but set an example that has shone, scarlet and bronze, grand and bloody, for the best part of 3,000 years.

Leonidas had, wrote Herodotus, "proved himself a very good man." No more needed to be said. The Spartan's deeds spoke for themselves. Compared with this, the bombast and bluster of the Miller version is simply tacky, a transformation of history not into myth, but kitsch.

Under these circumstances, Mr. Snyder's decision to stay so faithful to Mr. Miller's graphic novel ( Mr. Miller is an executive producer of the movie) can only be described as unfortunate. Even more dismayingly, the changes he has made are generally for the worse. Thus Xerxes's Immortals, his finest troops, are reduced to grotesques, stray orcs shipped in from Mordor. The rest of the Persian king's horde now features so many savage freaks and oddball beasts that Leonidas looks to be doing battle not with the might of Asia, but against the worst of Barnum & Bailey.

Yes, the manner in which the filmmaker has reproduced the look and feel of Mr. Miller's work is technically impressive (almost all the sets were "virtual"), but "300" would have benefited from concentrating less on the temptations of the digital backlot and more on old-fashioned storytelling. No less damaging, despite the occasional striking image, "300" is as aesthetically clumsy as it is technologically sophisticated. For the most part its visual style is an unhappy mix of Leni Riefenstahl and Iron Maiden, a ridiculous combination better imagined than seen. Despite some enjoyably gratuitous naked writhing (Oracle Girl!), bringing this tawdry vision to the big screen has almost nothing to be said for it, other, I suppose, than as another useful reminder that slow-motion shots of macho men walking together is a cliché that should have been killed off somewhere between "The Wild Bunch" and "Armageddon."

The cast does what it can, but it's not much. If most of the actors, including the bellowing, bellicose, and ripped Leonidas (Gerard Butler), appear to have been torn from the pages of a comic book, that is hardly their fault. They have been. On the plus side, Lena Headey as Leonidas's Queen Gorgo, fierce, foxy, and sort of feminist (well, they had to do something to persuade a few, you know, girls, to come to this movie), manages to deliver a performance verging on the three dimensional: She succeeds in emerging with dignity, if not clothing, intact.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo Santoro as a Xerxes of indeterminate ethnicity, omnivorous sexuality, and undeniable power manages to steal every scene in which he appears. His god-king may owe rather too much for comfort to Jaye Davidson's Ra in "Stargate," but the final sequences he shares on-screen with Leonidas appear to hint that the tensions between the two men may be erotic as well as military, a concept that cannot be faulted for its novelty.

Intriguing though that idea might be, if there is any genuine interest to be derived from "300," it lies in seeing the extent to which it reflects (or doesn't) the conflict that dominates our own era. The last time Hollywood tackled Thermopylae was "The 300 Spartans" (1962), a blunt Cold War allegory from a time when the threat from the east came from Moscow, not Mecca. This updated version is not so direct. It couldn't be: Mr. Miller's original work predates the fall of the twin towers. But look at the movie a little more closely and the imagery of our current troubles creeps into view, not least in the way some of Xerxes's warriors opt for the Al Qaeda/ninja chic more usually associated with Osama bin Laden's training camps.

Perhaps even more revealing is the way that, like the graphic novel, the movie fails to address the central paradox of Thermopylae: the fact that freedom's most effective defenders cared so little for individual liberty themselves. Of course, in our age of Guantanamo and Jack Bauer, that's a question that still resonates. If Mr. Snyder has chosen to dodge it, he's not the only one.