Saturday, March 10, 2007

07-03-10 300 (2007)

Seen: March 9, 2007
Format: Theater
Rating: 5

You know you're in trouble when your mind starts to wander in an actionfest like 300.

I collected comics in the 80s and thought Frank Miller was basically the second coming of Stan Lee, only with a broader moral compass and twisted mind. Frank's a very visual story teller, and the screen a great place to tell his tales. Sin City was brilliant; 300 isn't.

Don't get me wrong, this is a beautiful piece of work. Visually, its one of the most stunning pieces to come along in a few years, which is saying something, given the rate at which visual boundaries in film have been pushed over the last decade. The audio is on par too. The score is fitting and the sound design excellent.

And you know when I praise the technical details first, there's a problem somewhere else.

I haven't read Miller's 300, so I don't know how accurately his characters are adapted here. The way they come across on the screen is so passionless and flat that it makes me want to ... do something else, considering the way my mind wandered off in the third act.

The characters here are caricatures. Maybe this is appropriate. Maybe Spartans are so one dimensional that they really are this dis-interesting. The dialog ranges from flat to somewhere between stilted and pompous. There are many impassioned speeches, where the characters say pretty much exactly what you expect them to say. I guess in the long run I wanted at least one character to not be a stereotype. I wanted to feel that one of them was flawed in some way which could permit them to change. No, Ephialtes doesn't count. His external deformity represents his nature. His flaw is classic, his humiliation and defection predictable.

It irritated me that Gerard Butler couldn't make a forceful speech without spitting everywhere. I wondered whether that was his choice or the director's. I've appreciated Lena Headey's work in the past. It was nice to see her here, even though her talent went to waste voicing such a stereotypical character.

As I sat in the theater, I though that the entire movie looked like a giant video game with amazing production values. Another reviewer made the same observation. The difference between us is that he thinks that's a good thing. But I've played games with more interesting and better scripts, and in the theater I could only participant passively. Or course, if you want to play 300, you'll get your chance, it's coming soon.

Which I guess makes the film a really expensive commercial.

The Good: Dynamic visual style. Great Audio.

The Bad: Could someone please be unpredictable?

The Ugly: Bring on the freaks!

1 comment:

Jonathan Griggs said...

Agreed 100%

I nodded off several times during the dialog, of which there was far too much for a movie intended as a thrill-ride.

Even the battle scenes started to plod and become too samey once the initial wow of the stylized visuals wore off.

In video game terms, this movie is much less God of War than Dynasty Warriors 5.