300

I saw the movie 300 last night. Based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel by the same name, the film is a visual delight provided larger than life, computer graphics are your cup of tea. And they better be, because this is it. This is the only selling point of the movie. Maybe by some stretch of generosity, even the music can be called interesting, since unconventional it certainly is. But then, that’s it. Nothing else is memorable neither in terms of performance, story nor characterization.

I am not sure from where to start ripping this movie into shreds. Perhaps from the fact that the director, Zack Snyder has actually said in an interview that historical details were purposefully changed so that they would look “cool“ and work better for movie purposes. Pick up a goddamn fairy tale then! Don’t go around telling history the way you want to.

Or perhaps from the fact that everything looks so fake that even when heads get chopped off, or arms get mutilated, nothing really happens to you inside. Contrast that with a particularly poignant scene in Saving Private Ryan where one of the soldiers searches in the debris for his arm that has been just been blown off by a grenade.

Or perhaps from the fact that the protagonists know only three ways of delivering the already poor beyond belief dialogues so much so that in the entire movie there is not one dialogue that evokes the same emotion as the one in Gladiator when Russell Crowe faces Joaquin Phoenix and says, “My name is Maximus…commander of the armies of the north…loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, and I will have my vengeance in this life or the next.”

This is a war/ adventure film, but where is the tension, the gripping excitement, the edge of the seat thrill and fear that even the tamest of the scenes in Lord Of The Rings had? Nowhere, although 300 is one of the big blockbuster movies that Hollywood seems to be proud of this year.

More than anything else it is disgusting how the movie is all about the noble white man’s struggle and victory against the primitive Orient. The essential story of 300 is that Sparta and Greece have been challenged by the Persians. The Spartan king, Leonidas, is white, noble, heroic and someone every woman in the audience will find it very easy to fall in love with. Provided they don’t have backgrounds in history. By contrast, the Persian king, Xerxes is brown, primitive, and the kind of man very few will ever fantasize about. He lives in a harem, wears vulgar jewelry, is surrounded by naked women and other intoxications whereas the Spartan king is a good clean man, with no addictions, only noble heroic charms and of course he is staunchly monogamous. So the Asians have invaded Sparta with a million soldiers against whom only 300 of the Spartan army is available to fight. Now such unequal battles are part of history and have been fought countless times. My own brother who has got a supremely intelligent mind and memory for military history can write several essays to prove this right and so there is nothing shocking or alarming about the movie maker’s claim. But what is repulsive is how he brings his contemporary awareness and prejudices in to this film. His brand of Asians attack with strange monsters, magic and mumbo jumbo, disfigured men, and they demonstrate a passion for the weird, the brutal, and the savage. The Asian army is big, slow and rather incapable of war. The Spartans are methodical, disciplined, and swift. And of course the only person who defects to the Persian side is a grotesque man with severe disfigurements that make it impossible for him to fight from the Spartan side. So the implication is clear…you have to be totally wrong somewhere to take “their” side. Particularly telling is the last scene where the hero, King Leonidas is sprawled dead, his body pierced with arrows. From the way the camera moves over his body it immediately brings to mind images of crucifixion, and we know what parallels are being drawn between this celluloid hero and the other religious one. The suggestion of the battle between “good” versus “evil” and which side is which is too clear in the director’s head, and it is this black and white distinction that I am not comfortable with. There are too many grey cells protesting.