REVIEW: 300

Apr - 05 | By: Josh Nelson | no comments.

Like Sin City, the previous adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel, 300 clearly draws on the visual properties of the comic book: the sudden shifts in perspective, the highly composed framing, the overtly masculine point of view. And just like Miller & Varley’s impressive work, Zack (Dawn of the Dead) Snyder’s filmic adaptation is a bloody, hyperkinetic piece of cinema. The narrative, which elaborates little on the original source, is pared back to a skeletal frame; 300 Spartan warriors defend a small mountain pass against the invading hordes of the Persian army.

Led by their ‘Alpha Male’ King Leonidas (Gerard Butler in memorable performance), the soldiers of Sparta strike an impressive pose. Lifted right off the pages of Nietzsche’s “Superman”, they embody an impenetrable hyper-masculinity. By contrast, the Persian army led by Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is marked by a feminising racial otherness: a pierced and lascivious bunch of mutants and sexual deviants. If Sin City’s sex-gender politics at times seemed excessive to the point of parody, here there is little to suggest a similar self-reflexivity. Moreover, the political allegories of the narrative remain impossibly concealed, offering parallels between the Spartan insistence on war and sacrifice and more contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

Such readings are in themselves, however, somewhat simplistic. The Spartans here fight for a homeland against the might of a larger invading force, a role reversal which presents an interesting ideological context. And yet, in spite of all these sub-textual issues, 300 is an exhilarating visual feast. The largely computer generated landscape is marked by rich hues of red and brown, while the visceral imagery of slain corpses impaled upon trees or enmeshed within a rocky wall evokes the most nightmarish beauty of James Gleeson’s paintings. And like the corporeality of Gleeson’s work, 300 is ultimately concerned with a spectacle of bodies, brutally realised and impressively framed.