Throughout his very notable career, the indomitable Zack Snyder and his filmography has swung wildly between having me be genuinely impressed with his distinctive, muscular style (Dawn Of The Dead, Watchmen, Man Of Steel) and profoundly irritated with the excesses the man flatly refuses to subdue (Sucker Punch, Batman Vs. Superman); however, when it comes to properly understanding the filmmaker that Snyder strives to be, there’s no better movie to examine than his admittedly gorgeous, 2006, sword, sandals and slo-mo epic, 300. A spirited adaptation/love letter to Frank Miller’s graphic novel – itself an ode to overblown, exaggerated storytelling as it pumps up the legendary events of theBattle of Thermopylae up to phantasmagoric extremes – it gathers up all of the director’s favorite themes and unleashes them in an orgasmic extravaganza that bathes you in chroma-keyed visual that strives to outdo even Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City in the stakes of being a living comic book.
It’s 480 BC, we are breathlessly told the tale of Leonidas as he starts his traumatic journey from shaven headed youth, to his wise, bold and jacked as hell, kingship thanks to his training in the Spartan regime. However, after spending his formative years beating, being beaten and stabbing wolves in the face with spears, the grown ruler surveys his lush kingdom with his devoted wife, Queen Gorgo and his infant son by his side.
However, a cloud is on the horizon in the form of the immense army owned by the self proclaimed God-king Xerxes, who has set his eye on adding Greece to his vast kingdom and has sent appropriately smug emissaries to ask for Leonidas’ surrender in advance. This, predictably, goes down about as well as a hand glider made of lettuce and after giving his answer in the form of booting said emissaries down the nearest bottomless pit (every good kingdom should have one), he visits the gnarled, inbred priests to ask if the Gods will allow him to go to war.
After being told no (it turns out the priests are as corrupt on the inside as they are on the outside), Leonidas desides to play the semantics game and chooses to head off to the area where the invading army will land with 300 of his “personal guard” at his side – after all, you’re technically not waging war if you’re simply out for a stroll and you just happen to be attacked by would-be conquerors.
Picking a narrow pass known as the Hot Gates to make their stand, the Spartans smite the living shit out of anyone or thing that comes their way, but as these oily, killing machines hack their way through countless foes, bitter and greedy forces conspire against them both back home and the outskirts of battle.
Probably the most gloriously homoerotic action movie since Schwarzenegger brawled with a hulking Freddie Mercury lookalike at the climax of Commando, 300 has seemingly since become different things to different people. Some have embraced its absurdly masculine concepts as a lifestyle measuring stick, while others found its exaggerated leanings too ridiculous to take seriously hence the existence of the painful spoof movie, Meet The Spartans. However, all with most things in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle as this adaptation of Frank Miller’s grotesquely beautiful re-telling of history proves to be the perfect showcase for what makes Zack Snyder tick.
Always a sucker for legends, mythology and the nature of gods among men (remember, we got nearly four fucking hours of it in the Snydercut of Justice League), Snyder injects the story with an overdose of overindulgence, giving us not a telling of events, but the telling of the telling of events thanks to the hyperbolic rendition of David Wenham’s Dilios. This is not what Miller or Snyder think the Battle of Thermopylae was like, no, this is what Miller and think that Dilios thinks the Battle of Thermopylae was like, with all the bells, whistles and elaborations that come with a rousing tale of bloodthirsty heroism.
Taken in this respect, not only does 300 start to make perfect sense, but it reveals that most of the misplaced worship or criticism of the film is somewhat off base – lest we forget, this is a comic book movie people; expect a least a little razzle dazzle.
As Snyder makes style and substance virtually indistinguishable, he unloads a tsunami of trippy imagery upon us that plays the most metal, hallucination audiences had seen in quite a while: an orgy in Xerxes’ court features a goat-headed woman playing the harp; elephants and rhinos drafted into battle are reformatted as exotic monsters; men are slaughtered in droves as fight scenes snap from real-time to Snyder’s beloved Slo-Mo and back again to keep things hyper dynamic; the Persian hordes are seen as hulking giants or gargoyle-faced commandos.
Yes, on the surface it’s admittedly as shallow as a puddle of drool, but virtually every shot looks like a bronzed work of act that practically humps the eye into submission.
Thankfully, Snyder’s cast is absurdly up for the challenge, all sporting bodies of chiseled marble while spouting all their dialogue in guttural statements. Leading the pack is the patterned sneer of Gerard Butler who attacked the role with the thuggish flamboyance of Begbie from Trainspotting if he were reimagined in panto and his career making performance – which features the actor rocking defiant guyliner, boulder-sized pecs and a beard so manly, it juts out like surfboard – set the tone perfectly. In his wake lay an appropriately steely Lena Headey as Queen Gorgo, a dashing Michael Fassbender (who I always bloody forget is in this) and Dominic West as a deviously goateed politician who looks for all the world like Hugh Jackman’s evil twin and they all get stuck into the drama of the piece while all sporting rockin’ bods.
In fact, you could argue that the genuinely impressive physiques shows more care and attention than any other aspect of the movie has its detractors have pointed a finger at the lack of nuance in the plot. On top of that, there’s something a little disconcerting about the Greeks being portrayed by various, white actors while the Persians are predictably of a noticably darker hue and Snyder’s full embrace of a culture that happily annihilates weaker babies or beats their kids to make them tougher soldiers, but I believe that the director is trying to establish this ghoulishly vient world the same way that Paul Verhoven looked at “happy” fascism in Starship Troopers – by kind of thinking the piss out of it with overblown worship.
Some dismiss 300 as nothing more than Gladiator with attention deficit disorder and if you’re not into its comic book vibe, I could understand why you’d think that – but as a moving work of art that sometimes admittedly overstays its welcome, the union of Snyder and Miller proves to be a burst of beautiful madness. THIS! IS! SNYDER!
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