The wife and I went to see 300 last weekend. It was entirely satisfactory and an enjoyable waste of a few hours. What the film did, it did well, and it promised nothing that it did not deliver.
I’m just going to ramble on about the film for a bit, so if you haven’t seen it, there will probably be spoilers below. Of course, if you don’t already know the story of the 300 Spartans you are either a young teenager or simply an uneducated bastard; the plot really shouldn’t be the reason you go to see this film.
Visually, of course, the film is spectacular. It looks fantastic – in just the sort of way that stories look in one’s mind, with the momentary focus in fantastical detail and relief, and the subsidiary details never really filled in. The costumes of the warriors, the topography of the Hot Gates, the details of face and skin – then contrasted to the waving fields of Spartan grain, which are there as backdrop and look like backdrop.
What’s more, it looks just exactly like Frank Miller’s vision. There really is something to be said for the integral involvement of a graphic art creator in a film. Contrast 300, or its predecessor Sin City, with, say, X-Men 3. When the film producers feel that, somehow, their new (and generally stupid) ideas are somehow superior to the market-tested and consumer-approved ideas which were the reason the story was optioned in the first place, well, it’s a great way to kill a franchise. Whereas if they use the talent that was rewarded by the market in the first place, they can really translate a great work of art in one medium into their own.
But 300 was Frank Miller all over, and a $70.9 million dollar opening weekend was the result.
As for the content, it was okay. I mean, the original story is hard to beat, really. (And is well out of copyright, at least until Disney’s pet congressmen get around to their next act of prostitution.)
I’m generally a stickler for historical accuracy – but I am perfectly happy for pure entertainment to bend or distort history if there’s a good dramatic reason. No one is (I hope) going to see 300 to learn anything. Now, it’s laughable – truly laughable – to have the Spartans ostensibly fighting in the name of freedom. The Athenians one could make a case for. But not only were the Spartans themselves living a life of truly astonishing deprivation – the adjective “spartan” is honestly derived – but the entire purpose of their government and culture was to keep the hundred thousand plus helots the 9,000 Spartans ruled over in perpetual bondage.
So no one, least of all the Spartans, would have fought for the abstract concept of “freedom”. Resistance to Persian rule, perhaps. But the Russians died in their millions for Stalin, too.
Anyhow, laughable as that pretence was, it didn’t bother me. None of the general silliness – Spartan politicians! Ha! – did. As I say, the film was an entertainment.
Now, one thing that I would have enjoyed more would have been to give the Athenians their due at sea. In the film, the Persian navy is destroyed (or partially) by a storm. In actual fact, the Athenian navy bloodied the Persian nose at the Battle of Artemisium at just the same time as the Spartans were doing so on land at Thermopylae; it was not simply the weather, it was the Athenian fleet which kept the Persians from simply sailing around and encircling the Spartans easily.
As I say, historical inaccuracy in the cause of entertainment is just fine - if there’s dramatic reason for it. But my opinion is that the film would have been strengthened by the Spartans arriving at the sea to find, not a storm destroying the Persian fleet, but the Athenians beating them off. “Ha,” a Spartan would say, “Those boy-loving Athenians are good for something after all!” Hearty chuckles all around, because of course fighting on land is so much manlier than fighting on a boat.
Anyhow, a small quibble. The fact that the “Persians” seemed to be led by an African (which the Persian empire came nowhere near, the Egyptians having been in the way) and with an elite core of what can best be described as ninjas… well, it was entertaining. The super-yet-sub-human freaks… weird, but entertaining. The use of people’s backs as stairsteps by the God-King? Probably accurate.
So all in all, a good flick. It did bring up an interesting thought exercise, to which my wife and I had different reactions.
Would it be worth it, to do as Leonidas did and march into certain death, if you knew that people would still be telling your tale twenty-five hundred years later?
I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
- Sun Ra