Reeling Backward: 300 (2007)
Nearly two decades on, Zack Snyder's deeply silly historical epic/geek fever dream is easy to mock, but it's now deeply embedded in our popular culture and filmmaking aesthetic.
I didn’t get to write a review of “300” when it came out, but if I did here’s the words I would have used:
My ‘serious film critic’ brain recognizes this is a deeply silly movie. But the 14-year-old inside of me thinks it’s unbelievably awesome. Unfortunately for the people close to me, the latter guy holds a lot of sway.
“300,” love him/hate him director Zack Snyder’s second feature film after an apprenticeship in music videos, is indeed profoundly goofy. It plays like an adolescent geek (I identify) fever dream: a mishmash of historical epic, Dungeons & Dragons-style grimoire of horrifying creatures and a “Heavy Metal”-level fixation on exposed boobs and butts.
Not to mention, arcing fountains of bloodletting so impressive they make the wetworks of the “Kill Bill” duology seem relatively tame.
And yet… and yet…
I had not seen “300” since its release 18 years ago. My own eldest, himself now 14, expressed an interest and I decided he was ready for the hard-R festivities. He absolutely savored it. And his pops, now several decades removed from that physical (if not mental) age, grinned and laughed and slurped it all up like a mountainous sundae of frowned-upon delights.
I know I’m supposed to hate this movie. Stating an opinion otherwise risks my standing as a movie reviewer reputable audiences will listen to. But goddammit, “300” just kills.
And here’s the truth: the movie has become one of the most influential of this century, with its use of slow-motion brutal mayhem, alpha-male posturing and starkly xenophobic worldview. Coming out at a time when America was knee-deep in lamentable foreign adventures, it practically begs us to whoop chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”.
Even though it’s about Greeks from 2,500 years ago.
Made for an astonishingly low $65 million, “300” was shot almost entirely against green screens, with costumed actors doing their make-believe warring in complicated ballets of spear- and sword-play. All of the backgrounds and many of the enemies were added digitally afterwards — along with those arterial spurts, which if rendered through practical effects would’ve required hundreds of gallons of fake blood to be pumped out of the studio bilges each day.
Supposedly only a single scene in the movie was shot outdoors, even though almost the entirety of it takes place there.
In other words, it’s just about the fakest movie ever made. There was much conjecture at the time that the six-pack abs of the Spartans, which occur in <1% of real physiques but all of these cinematic ones, were achieved through CGI trickery. They appear to have been mostly real, but certainly were accentuated through extensive post-production alteration of lighting, color correction and other “enhancement.”
The story: Persian self-appointed god/king Xerxes is attempting to conquer the world, and has Greece next on his list. His army is actually an amalgamation of forces from all the nations he’s conquered, so there’s a multicultural mix of Asian assassins, Arabic swordsmen, African spearmen, rhinos, elephants, etc. Not to mention some altered humanoid figures that resemble “Lord of the Rings” ogres or have bone-saws for arms.
Pretty much all of Xerxes’ forces are brown folks of some hue, while the Spartans are strictly white dudes, though of the more Mediterranean tint. Gerald Butler’s King Leonidas looks like he stepped straight off some sculptor’s pedestal, a magnificent specimen of prime brunette manhood… even if he comes with a healthy dash of eyeliner.
Xerxes himself is played by Rodrigo Santoro, engorged into an 8-foot-tall chimera of bald beauty accented with pounds of jangly gold jewelry/piercings and even more copious makeup. Of course, he has a bit of a pansexual swish to him, as when he lovingly caresses Leonidas’ broad shoulders while trying to sway him to kneel down.
Leonidas rejects the demand of Xerxes’ envoy, who arrives armed with the crowned skulls of defeated kings as warning. He famously kicks the offender into a fatal deep pit with the trumpeted pronouncement: “This… is… SPARTA!” One is surprised he didn’t whip out his junk afterward and wave it around for emphasis.
The angry king is nonetheless forbidden by the ancient oracle Ephors from making war during a time of holiday. This section seems to exist only to show off the cool leprous makeup of the oracles — and liken them to politicians, useless and corrupt, but ones who must be heeded. Oh, and as a bonus: a writhing lady in diaphanous non-clothing.
Leonidas decides to honor the letter of the oracle’s law if not the spirit, taking a stroll with 300 of his personal bodyguard up the north coast. It just so happens they’ll arrive at the Hot Gates in Thermopylae, a narrow mountain pass where Xerxes’ multitudes — millions, supposedly — cannot bring their numbers to bear.
The movie at least portrays Leonidas’ wife, Gorgo — funny, I don’t remember her name ever being spoken in the film — as virtuous and stalwart. Played by Lena Headey in her pre-”Game of Thrones” days, she gets to do some energetic lovin’ with her hubby before he departs for war, their longing gazes signaling they both know this is the last time they’ll see each other.
Her primary antagonist is Theron, a sniveling Spartan politician played by Dominic West who secretly makes a side deal with Xerxes. You can tell he’s a baddie because he wears traditional Greek robes to cover his pathetic lack of abs.
After pressuring her into having sex with him, Theron then betrays the queen by publicly accusing her of adultery with him in front of the Senate, which has a really cagey closed-loop of logic: screw her, and then use said screwing to screw her over.
Unfortunately for him, Gorgo emulates Leonidas by simply gutting him with a guard’s sword, resulting in his cache of bribery gold marked with Xerxes’ bust to spill out in front of the senators (along with his innards). Because carrying direct evidence of their crimes on their person is totally a thing a calculating politician does.
The real action, of course, is on the battlefield, which takes place over the course of three days. Leonidas tells his men up front that they’re all going to die, so there’s no second-guessing. None of his men perish on the first day, but plenty do on the second, building up to the final, doomed showdown.
They are betrayed by Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan), a hunchback Spartan castoff, who trails the army and offers his services to Leonidas to redeem his family name. The proud king refuses his services, supposedly because he can’t raise his shield high enough to protect the man next to him, which begs the counterfactual that, well, somebody’s got to be on the end.
Ephialtes is tempted by Xerxes with earthly delights (more boobs) and returns for a final scene dressed as a sorcerer’s apprentice, or something. The audience is supposed to sneer Ephialtes, though the truth is if Leonidas had shown him the slightest measure of grace, they probably would have held the Hot Gates indefinitely.
(But then, no movie.)
In he-man Spartan culture, babies with birth defects like Ephialtes are killed so as not to weaken the gene pool. Further, boys undergo agoge at a young age to prove their worth, a sort of vision quest/rite of passage/culling of the herd in which they’re forced to go out into the wild alone.
During Leonidas’ ritual, he killed a fell black wolf that seems spat up straight from the gates of hell. A pendant made from its fang serves as his personal totem, a gift to Gorgo that she returns to him for his fatal last stand.
Ephialtes was just a local villager in the original accounts, but if you’re looking for historical accuracy in “300,” you’ll need to whip up your own CGI landscape to find it. Similarly, only a few hundred Arcadians are shown helping the Spartans, though really there were several thousand soldiers made up of various tribes.
Leonidas seems to tolerate rather than welcome their presence — “Brave amateurs… they do their part” — eventually dismissing them before the fighting gets real.
I had not realized this film marked the screen debut of Michael Fassbender, playing Stelios, a grinning jackal of a Spartan who gets the honor of dying at Leonidas’ side. He and another young warrior have a bit of a Legolas-and-Gimli game going on, comparing their kills in pursuit of “a beautiful death.”
Speaking of “LOTR” again, Faramir (David Wenham) turns up here as Dilios, a veteran of Leonidas’ campaigns who is notable for having the gift of gab. (Paid for, no doubt, by having a noticeably less swole physique and undersculpted abs. Practically a Theron.)
He is picked by Leonidas to be the sole survivor of the 300 and carry their story back to Sparta and the rest of Greece to unite against Xerxes, using his own sacrifice as inspiration.
Dilios doing just that serves as the framing device for the story, and the clear implication is that he has embellished the tale as Leonidas commanded to achieve the greatest effect. So the supernatural aspects of the enemy are, for the purposes of this storytelling, granted to be pure BS.
I did recall a line of dialogue from Dilios, which I quite literally LOL’d at when I saw it in 2007. After losing one of his peepers in the previous fight, Leonidas teases him that “that scratch” won’t prevent him from being fit for battle. Dilios seems positively offended: “It's only an eye. The gods saw fit to grant me a spare.”
(Same goes for testicles, D-man, but I suspect you’d be less sanguine about that loss.)
Leonidas nearly loses an eyeball himself when fighting one of Xerxes’ more loathsome devil/men, whose massive sword sparks a line across his helmet face. I noticed that in the final battle, this etching has expanded into a deep rusty chip, as if decades had passed, wearing down the king’s armor. It’s a subtle, but telling detail.
This was no doubt inspired, along with the entirety of the movie’s look-and-feel, by the graphic novel upon which it was based, by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. Miller was trying to do for Leonidas what he did for Batman — turning him from an interesting heroic figure into the dark apotheosis of redeeming spirit.
Indeed, Snyder was intent on making a shot-for-shot replication of the graphic novel, lifting the same idea that Robert Rodriguez had used in another Miller adaptation, “Sin City,” a year earlier.
In this, he succeeded beyond his wildest hopes. I expect that’s why Snyder makes such liberal use of slo-mo — as if to bring those still images to life and then, slow them down to photographic iconography again.
A 2014 prequel, subtitled “Rise of an Empire” and subcontracted to director Noam Murro, did decent box office but lacked the original’s verve. If you can believe it, there have even been rumors of another Snyder-helmed iteration, complete with fan-generated trailers featuring the likes of Dwayne Johnson and Pedro Pascal. But they appear to be a hoax… for now.
The truth is, as easy as “300” is to mock, it's now deeply embedded in our popular culture and filmmaking aesthetic. You can see its DNA everywhere, most evidently in the superhero franchises that dominated the box office for the next 15 years.
Watching it again with my firstborn, I howled with laughter at its kooky eccentricities and cheered lustily as the exotic invaders are carved up like rotten fish washed up onto the beaches of Thermopylae.
A Y-chromosome fantasia told with the greatest of glee, the ultimate victory of “300” was over Hollywood itself.