300
Well, I finally got around to seeing it. It was probably more impressive in the theater, of course, and I regret not seeing it there. Visually, it was impressive. Unique, even. While I never read the original comic it seems very faithful to what the style of the comic must have been. In terms of the production value, battle sequences, and so forth, it was very good. Of course, there was some disturbing subtext:
- Infanticide is a crucial part of the social order.
- Foreigners are inhuman monsters. People with congenital defects are not to be trusted. Black people are evil. Asians are evil. People from the Middle East are evil. And they aren’t very manly, either.
- Warlike kings are honorable and trustworthy, pacifists are not to be trusted. Any check against the leader’s power to make war is antiquated, and anyone who tries to uphold those laws is actually a traitor.
Sure, you may point out that some (but not all) of these ideas were prevalent in ancient Sparta. That’s not the point. Ancient Sparta was what it was—portraying them as artificially noble and freedom-living while vilifying the Persians turns it from epic to cartoonish. (It’s up to you to decide whether “being cartoonish” is a bad thing for a comic book adaptation.) And yes, it’s disturbing that the primary method of vilifying the Persians was to turn them into non-white queers, in case we ever confused them with the white hetero Spartans. The badass-warrior-culture that goes out and kicks ass is such a great idea that’s pulled off so well in so many other places, but making them sympathetic the way 300 did just blunts that. I want to have some evil in my antiheroes, and 300 bleaches it out, with a lot of implicit bigotry tainting the whole thing.
It was a lot better than I had feared, but I still don’t think it’s nearly as good as people say it was.
Tags: 300, propaganda
And you judged it before you’d even seen it… It was awesome in theatres and it was still fantastic at home.
You should be glad I took the effort to see it and make a final judgment. It was great for what it was, but I do see where the criticisms and flaws come from.
When I originally wrote this, I stopped short of saying that Hitler would have loved this movie–the fact is, it’s too silly and cartoonish to take seriously the subtexts that are implied. The device of constructing most of the film as a campfire story told by an unreliable narrator exonerates this as well—the biases given in the story align perfectly with the biases we might presume of a Spartan soldier.
But the characters were still one-dimensional caricatures, and 300 (despite trying as hard as it can) still stops short of epic.
The primary redeeming characteristics of 300 are the visual element (unlike most comic book adaptations, and like Sin City, it clearly retains the non-realistic visual style of the original work) and the battle scenes (which were perfectly balanced—visceral enough to seem real, but idealized enough to be more exciting than disgusting). The acting is poor and the writing is questionable but given those less-than-perfect elements, they clearly made the most out of what they had.