U.S. Release Date: March 9, 2007
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: Michael B. Gordon, Kurt Johnstad, Frank Miller (comic book), Zack Snyder
Producer: Deborah Snyder, Jeffrey Silver, Mark Canton, Gianni Nunnari, Bernie Goldmann
Composer: Tyler Bates
Cast: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West, David Wenham, Rodrigo Santoro
Running Time: 1 hour and 57 minutes
MPAA Rating: R (graphic battle sequences throughout, some sexuality and nudity)
Review:
Prepare for gory: the overblown 300 slices, dices and largely decimates any sign of intelligent life in a computer-generated, music video-styled monster mash that calls itself a movie. It's more like an all-out blitzkrieg against one's perceptual senses, but it is consistently locked in attack mode.
Like watching a blood-drunk barbarian on a rampage, 300, like its title, drops the pretense of history—it purports to dramatize the ancient battle of Thermopylae between Spartans and Persians—and offers what can only be described as a mongrel mix of audio-visual fury. 300 is History hijacked by Horror.
One can discern what is happening on screen, though it doesn't make much sense except as a terror fantasy (it will surprise no one that this movie comes from the same person who directed the Dawn of the Dead remake). But it exists strictly to quicken the pulse for a few seconds at a pop.
That it does. A band of Spartan men go to war led by a king (Gerard Butler) married to a queen (Lena Headey) who insulted the enemy that marches upon their civilization, which is depicted as a haven for hateful half-savages. It's easier to follow who's who and what's what than one might expect, yet everything is hyper-exaggerated. 300 is submerged in style over substance.
The king kills the insolent enemy messenger, consults deformed mystics and their undulating nymph slave, mounts his wife every which way and sets out with his grunting group of soldiers to take a stand against the oncoming Persian zombies. It takes almost an hour before the bloodletting begins. The script is filled with words—tyranny, freedom, reason—that go completely unsupported and have no meaning. The Spartans, portrayed as snarling animals seeking hostility for its own sake, claim superiority over mysticism, but cartoonish mystics inflict real damage, thereby negating the power of reason over faith.
Faced with giants, monsters and Rodrigo Santoro as a transgendered God/king/queen in golden eye shadow, the doomed Spartans, who appear to shave their bodies, put up a helluva fight. But with a military philosophy—the Spartan king regrets that he has so few lives to sacrifice—resembling the Bush administration's foreign policy, the mighty Spartans lack the mind to match the muscle.
If sacrifice is noble, why bother to fight—why not hurry up and die? And why—oh, never mind, this latest message of Doomsday nihilism, which sidesteps history, serves one purpose: to validate chronic fear.
300 looks fake and it delivers action in that tentative, stagy, slow-motion, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style. It deafens with noise, clatter and blaring guitar that sounds like Black Sabbath for the elevator and when heads start to roll, literally, it's hard not to burst out laughing, which is exactly what happened. Wild, radical and what the kids call Kewl? Not unless you're jacked up on mindless video games and are itching to fry some brain cells. 300 doesn't get past zero. Scott Holleran
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: Michael B. Gordon, Kurt Johnstad, Frank Miller (comic book), Zack Snyder
Producer: Deborah Snyder, Jeffrey Silver, Mark Canton, Gianni Nunnari, Bernie Goldmann
Composer: Tyler Bates
Cast: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West, David Wenham, Rodrigo Santoro
Running Time: 1 hour and 57 minutes
MPAA Rating: R (graphic battle sequences throughout, some sexuality and nudity)
Review:
Prepare for gory: the overblown 300 slices, dices and largely decimates any sign of intelligent life in a computer-generated, music video-styled monster mash that calls itself a movie. It's more like an all-out blitzkrieg against one's perceptual senses, but it is consistently locked in attack mode.
Like watching a blood-drunk barbarian on a rampage, 300, like its title, drops the pretense of history—it purports to dramatize the ancient battle of Thermopylae between Spartans and Persians—and offers what can only be described as a mongrel mix of audio-visual fury. 300 is History hijacked by Horror.
One can discern what is happening on screen, though it doesn't make much sense except as a terror fantasy (it will surprise no one that this movie comes from the same person who directed the Dawn of the Dead remake). But it exists strictly to quicken the pulse for a few seconds at a pop.
That it does. A band of Spartan men go to war led by a king (Gerard Butler) married to a queen (Lena Headey) who insulted the enemy that marches upon their civilization, which is depicted as a haven for hateful half-savages. It's easier to follow who's who and what's what than one might expect, yet everything is hyper-exaggerated. 300 is submerged in style over substance.
The king kills the insolent enemy messenger, consults deformed mystics and their undulating nymph slave, mounts his wife every which way and sets out with his grunting group of soldiers to take a stand against the oncoming Persian zombies. It takes almost an hour before the bloodletting begins. The script is filled with words—tyranny, freedom, reason—that go completely unsupported and have no meaning. The Spartans, portrayed as snarling animals seeking hostility for its own sake, claim superiority over mysticism, but cartoonish mystics inflict real damage, thereby negating the power of reason over faith.
Faced with giants, monsters and Rodrigo Santoro as a transgendered God/king/queen in golden eye shadow, the doomed Spartans, who appear to shave their bodies, put up a helluva fight. But with a military philosophy—the Spartan king regrets that he has so few lives to sacrifice—resembling the Bush administration's foreign policy, the mighty Spartans lack the mind to match the muscle.
If sacrifice is noble, why bother to fight—why not hurry up and die? And why—oh, never mind, this latest message of Doomsday nihilism, which sidesteps history, serves one purpose: to validate chronic fear.
300 looks fake and it delivers action in that tentative, stagy, slow-motion, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style. It deafens with noise, clatter and blaring guitar that sounds like Black Sabbath for the elevator and when heads start to roll, literally, it's hard not to burst out laughing, which is exactly what happened. Wild, radical and what the kids call Kewl? Not unless you're jacked up on mindless video games and are itching to fry some brain cells. 300 doesn't get past zero. Scott Holleran
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