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Trailer for "300"

The historical stage, for those of you who may be rusty on your ancient history (or grew up after a time when they stopped teaching it): In the year 480 BC, Xerxes, the king of Persia, is taking over everything he can. He now has his sights set on Greece. Just as happy to have them surrender, he offers terms to the leaders of the various Greek city-states. Given that Xerxes’ forces number in the area of 5.3 million (if you’re to believe Herodotus, and lots of historians do), many of the Greeks figure there’s no sense postponing the inevitable and give in.

Not so Leonidas, king of the city-state of Sparta, who shows what he thinks of Xerxes’ offer by tossing his messengers into a bottomless pit. He tries to rally the Spartan Council to let him march into battle against Xerxes—battle being what Spartans are raised for—but they pass, citing an upcoming moon festival as an excuse. Leonidas sez, “Fuck you wusses and your moon, I’m going anyway.” And off he goes, with an all-volunteer personal guard of 300 courageous warriors, to meet destiny at a place called Thermopylae.

Okay, Leonidas doesn’t actually say “Fuck you wusses,” but 300 is the kind of movie where you wouldn’t entirely be surprised if he did. This is history as mythology as seen by Frank Miller, the comic book artist who gave the world the brooding Dark Knight saga that inspired the Batman revival of the 1980s (though none of the movies made since then hold a candle to Miller’s grim vision). He was adapted for the movies more successfully—and more literally—in 2005’s Sin City, for which Robert Rodriguez used Miller’s actual drawings as digital backgrounds for his characters to act against.

The film of 300, based on Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, takes what Rodriguez did and raises the bar. As directed by Zack Snyder, whose Dawn of the Dead was by a long shot the best of the recent remakes of 1970s and 1980s horror movies, 300 is a relentless, exhilarating rush of a movie. Enacted almost entirely in front of digitally designed scenes and sets, it is to war movies what Moulin Rouge was to Hollywood musicals, a visual assault utterly unconcerned with plausibility, rolling over clichés with operatic fervor.

It is also, let me hasten to add, gruesome, violent and more than a little ridiculous. The music is of the variety you get when you put a symphony orchestra into the hands of someone raised on Metallica. The actors are clad in preposterously muscled body suits that look like they were designed by Tom of Finland. And the script is filled with dialogue that may read okay in a word balloon but which sounds laughable when spoken: “Into hell’s mouth we march!” “Only the hard and strong may call themselves Spartans—Only the hard. Only the strong.” Or my favorite, “Prepare your breakfast and eat hearty, for tonight we dine in hell!”

Yet none of this is tongue in cheek. 300 is a film made for the 12-year-old boy in every viewer (and that includes women, who get to root for the Spartan queen, Gorgo, as she faces down the lily-livered politicians who refuse to back her husband.) As Leonidas, the king whose only goal is to kill as many Persians as he can before he is inevitably overcome, the Scottish actor Gerald Butler throws himself into the spirit of the thing with such unbridled ferocity that I for one was willing to forgive him his title role in the film of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera. As historical heroes go, his Leonidas is one badass mofo and Butler gives a starmaking performance.

For those of you who tire of the clash of swords, the flight of arrows and the severing of limbs, 300 offers a wide array of sub/super/non-human warriors in the enemy army, beginning with Xerxes himself, a 10-foot giant in metal clothing and bejeweled piercings (you’d never recognize him as the Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro of TV’s Lost). And the digitally created backdrops give the whole film a feeling of both novelty and familiarity, like a fever dream.

In a story in Monday’s New York Times, Michael Cieply writes that 300 is being viewed as a commentary on George Bush’s war. It’s not hard to find parallels—but you can easily make the case in whatever direction you please (Bush as the implacable Xerxes, Bush as the freedom-loving Leonidas). I can’t take any of that too seriously. Still, if it provokes a lively argument around your watercooler on Monday morning, go for it.

Miller’s graphic novel (with colorist Lynn Varley) was published in 1999, and plans to film it began soon after. It clearly predates the current war, and even the Bush presidency. That it comes out when it does, at a time when more and more Americans are growing heartsick at our involvement in an ill-planned war whose casualties seem to have no end in sight, is an accident of Hollywood production cycles. At a press junket for 300 in Los Angeles last month, I asked director Zack Snyder how he felt about his movie, with its cry “Prepare for glory!” reaching audiences at a time when they have a real war on their minds.

“I guess that’s unavoidable,” he sighed. “I’m not going to pretend to be like, ‘What’s that, Iraq? There’s a war going on? What are you talking about?’ That’s a reality of the world. I tried to make a movie that looks at the nobility of conflict, that asks if there is such a thing. I didn’t do it in relationship to what’s happening now because I don’t have that much foresight—I wish I had. The point is that there can be nobility in sacrifice. Does that give context to sacrifice that we’ve maybe lost in the muddle of our current situation, is there a way to get that back? And also, the story is 2,500 years old. Does history have some bad habit of being a big circle? Yeah. But is that part of my design? I don’t think so.”

It was a moment conspicuous for its seriousness from the lanky, unpretentious Snyder, who looks more like a skate kid than a 41-year-old veteran of music videos and commercials (he has two Clios to his credit). Asked what he would like to hear that people thought of his film, he answered, “Just that it was a fun ride, really. I’m a movie fan, and I think it’s hard in our day and age to make a movie that is fun but at the same time engaging and different and not made in the boardroom. Especially a movie that has a lot of visual effects. Hollywood loves to, with superhero movies especially, they always feel like they popped out of a mold somewhere, just give them a different poster. With 300, the studio said, ‘What do you think would be cool?’ To have a subject like the Spartans, and source material by Frank Miller, that’s all cool. That’s awesome.”

Snyder and his partners originally shopped 300 around at a time when Hollywood was pouring huge amounts of money into the historical epics Troy and Alexander. “So no one was really all that interested. It just didn’t ring as a needed film—why reinvent a thing that’s not broken? We were considering maybe going independent, which could be great but it’s a lot of work getting the financing, when I was offered Dawn of the Dead. So I said, look, I’m gonna go do this, when I come back we’ll get started again. And when I was gone they did look at some other directors, but no one wanted to do it, thank god.”

As his full-length debut, Dawn allowed Snyder to solidify his thinking about movies. “I’m obsessed with the tone of movies,” he explained. “I feel that’s what a movie is, more than its story or characters. When you ring the bell of a movie that’s what you hear, the untouchable, indescribable part that you feel.

“With Dawn I wanted to make a cult movie at a movie studio. The movie studio did not want me to make that movie. Halfway through they came up to me and said, ‘What are you doing? You’re a commercial director—where are all those cool commercial shots, the doves, the clothesline blowing in the wind, the slick imagery,’ and I said, ‘It’s not appropriate to the movie, this is a zombie movie, it shouldn’t look like a frickin’ beer commercial.’

“My favorite thing about Dawn is that it’s self-aware, it knows it’s a zombie movie: No actor ever winks at the camera, everyone plays it heart attack serious, but on the other hand they know. And that’s the same way I feel about 300—I wanted the tone of the graphic novel to come through. Graphic novels are larger than life. The way Frank Miller’s Spartans talk, the way they stand, the way they fight, all of it is inspired by a giant comic book vision. I wasn’t trying to fool the audience into thinking this was Kingdom of Heaven, one of those very earnest time machine movie where you go back and see how gritty and dirty everything was—‘Look, that’s where they go to the bathroom!’”

Miller’s novel is almost exclusively concerned with the Battle of Thermopylae, and what additions Snyder and the other screeenwriters made to the script was largely to give the story some context. Most notably they expanded the part of Leonidas’ wife, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), who wages a battle of her own on the home front. “The challenge became, if we’re going to hang out with the Spartan queen, what’s her deal? She’s gonna be a badass, right? All we had to go on from the graphic novel and what research I did in history were two lines—‘Come back with your shield or on it,’ and ‘Only Spartan women give birth to real men.’ So if you use those to sketch a character out, you end up with a pretty tough cat.”

The script also creates a scheming politician, Theron (Dominic West), to fill an audience need that Xerxes doesn’t quite fill. “Xerxes is not necessarily the bad guy in the movie,” Snyder explained. “He’s a god king whose attitude is, ‘I need Greece, it’s a thing I need to add to my collection, and you guys happen to be in my way.’ The offer he makes the Greeks is really not that bad, if you look at it as a contract. So Theron is there to give the movie a bad guy for you to hate, who isn’t abstract. Xerxes is like Darth Vader in Star Wars—you don’t hate Darth Vader, he just is.”