'300' is geek mythology

Everything is overscaled in this film adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel.

By Peter Rainer | Film critic of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 9, 2007 edition

Page 1 of 2

A lot of manly physiques – 300 of them to be exact – go down in defeat in "300." But director Zack Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae is anything but downbeat. The three hundred strong are, after all, Spartans, and their stand against 250,000 Persian invaders under Xerxes is legendary.

And don't the filmmakers know it. Just about everything in this pea-brained epic is overscaled and overwrought – it's a cartoon trying to be a towering triptych. The dissonance between the film's heroic ambitions and its grindingly coarse treatment is rather amusing. It pays to remember that the film's target audience is teenage boys.

Sparta is rendered, without irony, as the ideal Greek city-state. Boys are taken from their mothers at age 7 to learn the art of war. The Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) does not think much of the rival Athenians, whom he dismisses as "philosophers and boy lovers." Far better to hone one's pecs than one's intellect.

When a Persian emissary demands that Leonidas submit to Xerxes, the Spartan honcho literally kills the messenger. Despite a lot of oracular mumbo jumbo warning Leonidas to cool it, he assembles three hundred – I guess it's actually 299 – stalwart hunks to go up against Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) knowing full well they all will die.

But for Leonidas, nothing less than the future of democracy is at stake (although his penchant for impaling every last Persian battle survivor isn't exactly the most high-minded of gestures). By setting a stoic example, and allowing other Hellenic forces to take up the charge, he guarantees his place in the history books. And the comic books.

By the way, don't be misled by all the Internet-fueled chatter about how Leonidas, or Xerxes, is a stand-in for George W. Bush. Never was a movie less of a candidate for an Op-Ed piece.

Page 1 | 2 | Next Page