Review: 300 (2007)
Frank Miller’s nostalgic look back at a time when men were brainwashed by their government at an early age to think of nothing but dying in battle, and silly notions of free will and inner examination were rightly discarded as effeminate and weak. “300″ depicts a past time, a better time, where men with supernatural abs of marble chopped each other to pieces in the name of super-duper holier than though studliness, and said studliness was narrated over again in tedious, faux-Road Warrior mysticism. Hail Sparta!
Frank Miller is not untalented, his work (Sin City, The Dark Knight Returns) is largely steeped in ridiculous cliches most would discard before they’ve left adolescence, but there’s a fever to his work, a current of emasculated male outrage, pure, unchecked by anything sensible or PC, that is hard to forget or discount, he’s pure id.
Unfortunately the talented director, Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead 2004) feels the need to inflate this orgy to 2 hours with a lot of post-Braveheart, Gladiator, insert-your-favorite-beefcake-dies-for-his-right-to-be-beefy-tract-here hooey: the shots of wheat blowing in the wind, boring political intrigue on the home front, and that same lame orchestral score that’s been passed around these movies for five years. It’s dispiriting, and it pulls you away from 300’s one honest attribute: kinetic beheading of man and monster.
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