Sam Reviews: 300
Apr.13, 2007, filed under Miscellany
We havered [ObnonScots: dithered] over whether to go see this with Mum and Dad for ages. They were keen, but very busy, so we decided to go ourselves.
Having heard several bad reviews of it in the preceding week Frood and I deliberately deleted any and all expectation from our minds and prepared to accept whatever was given to us. We had both read the original graphic novel: it’s sitting on my shelf over there as I type. “Minimalist” is a good word for that. There’s not much to it. I admit I was a bit baffled by the 116 minute advertised running time: how could they stretch those few pages into nearly two hours?
Lots of slow motion, that’s how. Slow motion beheading, slow motion marching, slow motion blood flying across the screen… if you’ve seen Sin City you’ll know the visual effect. There was also that slightly unrealistic colour palette, which added to the general Miller feel.
It was okay. Really. I kind of liked the fight scenes. Some of the Spartans were really very attractive, in a sweatily slippery, muscular sort of way. Gerard Butler, playing King Leonides (unrecognisable from his Tomb Raider days) had a simply adorable soft Scottish accent that was vaguely reminiscent of Sean Connery. I half expected to hear him say “This is SPAAAAAARTAAAAA, Mish Moneypenny.”
I note from the IMDB entry that he’s rumoured to be in the new production of Watchmen. Dear gods in heaven. That’s a film that SHOULD NOT be made.
Gods only know what that whole political sub-plot involving the Queen was for. Queenie lasts about 3 pages in the book and isn’t heard from again. It was unnecessary, and if they’d cut that out then it would have brought the film down to a far more reasonable 90 minutes, thus enabling me to sit through it without looking at my watch every five minutes for the last half an hour.
The creature effects were disappointing. There’s no excuse for crap special effects in this day and age. If you’re going to have a war heffalump, make it a good one. David Wenham provided some amusement as Delios, but only because I remember him as the sex-starved friar from Van Helsing. Xerxes looked like he’d been press-ganged from a gay Portland fetish nightclub and could have walked straight onto a Rocky Horror set without batting an eyelid. Having said that, the facial piercings were in the book, so that’s not the film’s fault. I’d still have preferred to see someone who was properly black and imperial in appearance. The book made me think of the royalty in H Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, not someone who does vocals for Jane’s Addiction or the Chilli Peppers.
I don’t get the frequently-heard complaints about it being too American. There weren’t any Americans in it. Not obviously, anyway. Sure there was a lot of “Hooah!” and patriotic obsession, but we’re talking Spartans here. I would expect that of them.
The narrative, performed by David Wenham, was pretty much straight from the book and overall the film was a reasonable adaptation, aside from being overly long. Sure there were some issues with historical accuracy, but does anyone think that Xerxes was really 9 feet tall with a voice like someone out of Stargate? I like to think that it was a film of what the perception of those participating might have been like: the presentation was coloured by the way the participants viewed the world. From that perspective, it was a pretty good bash. To us modern Westerners these ideas might seem ridiculous and even blatantly wrong: to those taking part, they might have been close to the mark. I think that was what Miller was trying to do in the book and the film-makers had a go at putting that on the big screen.
I might be giving them more credit than they’re due, of course, but other than the ridiculous and entirely invented sub-plots I think they did a pretty good job.
Not a great film by any stretch of the imagination. I enjoyed Ghost Rider more. That said, I don’t regret going: this isn’t a The Core or The Cave, both of which left me fuming that I would never get that time back, and I paid for the privilege of having my brain polluted.
Don’t worry if you’ve missed it, but don’t fret about it being crap and useless if you’ve already bought tickets.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
