Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Go
Digitally Enhance the Spartans
(300, 3/19/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It
was in John Ford's classic 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valence that the famous line was uttered, "When the legend
becomes fact, print the legend." In 2007, Director Zack (Dawn
of the Dead) Snyder goes Ford one better in his sword & sandal
fantasia, 300: he doesn't just "print the legend,"
he makes up plenty of his own.
To be clear, this writer has nothing
against filmmakers taking liberties with historical events. There's
no criticism cheaper than insisting artists keep slavish fidelity to
what "really" happened—whatever that is. Indeed, reality
should be embroidered when it helps fiction approach a larger
truth than that attested by mere facts. But when the made-up stuff is
there for nothing but its own sake, it is then (as Borat says) we have
big problem.
There's isn't much mystery about
what happened in the pass of Thermopylae in the late summer of 480 BC.
According to the historian Herodotus, as a massive invasion army and
fleet under King Xerxes of Persia approached Greece, 300 Spartans and
about 5,000 allies under Spartan King Leonidas tried to bottle up the
enemy at the narrow pass the Greeks called "the hot gates."
After three days of hard fighting, the Persians broke through the Gates,
leaving Leonidas and a few hundred other Spartans dead on the field.
Later, an epitaph was erected at Thermopylae that read something like
"Go tell the Spartans, passer-by, that here, obedient to their
laws, we lie." The battle has subsequently become a synonymous
with military indomitability and a milestone in the rise of the West.
It would be more accurate to say
that Snyder's version is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, not
the histories of Herodotus. The movie therefore comes off as a strange
combination of frantic and static, with lots of overcooked visuals and
stationary tableaux meant to evoke Miller's comic book panels. The main
aesthetic consideration is to impress fifteen year-old boys from Fresno
toYokohama. To that end, Snyder's Persians bring not only massive numbers
to Thermopylae, but ninjas, hand-grenades, and rhinos. The Spartans,
who are universally ripped and lovingly oiled, return fire with spears
and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of piquant one-liners.
To be honest, there is a fifteen
year-old inside this writer who did go, like, "cool." This,
despite the oddness of Snyder's Leonidas (Gerard Butler) going on about
defending "freedom" and "reason" (the historical
Spartans were unique among the Greeks for enslaving other Greeks; they
were also renowned for being suspicious of any sort of fancy thinkin').
I was even content to get in the spirit of Snyder's feast of beefcake—even
though the ideal ancient Spartan was half-starved and vain about his
hair, not his delts. By Jove, the blood and limbs do fly, but the spectacle
of scantily clad-guys with slab pecs and tall-boy abs posed on the sand
still feels pretty ridiculous. Add the cocoa butter and a few Speedos,
and this could be bikini-wax day at Muscle Beach.
But Snyder really loses me with
his portrayal of the Persians. Herodotus, who was not above adding colorful
details to his history, rightly portrayed Xerxes as a megalomaniac,
but he never described his troops as subhuman. Indeed, there was never
much doubt at the time about whether the Greeks or the Persians had
the more tolerant, refined culture—Herodotus says the Persians
were eager to adopt the best customs from all over the ancient world,
but all they got from Greece was pederasty. Granted, the Persian army
swarmed into Greece from the Middle East, but it surely didn't include
trolls and orcs from Middle Earth. "Racist" is not a word
thrown around much in this column, but if the sandal fits here.
Nor is it clear exactly what the
lauded Frank Miller treatment, seen most recently onscreen in Sin
City, really brings to this story. Nearly all the digital backgrounds
in 300 come washed in a jarring sepia-tone that begs to be wiped
off the screen with a damp cloth. We get lots of buff figures posed
heroically against turbulent skies, but hardly a ray of natural light
in the whole film. Imagine that—Greece, in the summer, with no
sunshine!
The opening-day audience I saw the
film with was filled with college-age males. At one point, the guy next
to me turned to his buddy and observed "This movie is for our demographic."
On the way out, the mood was polite, but nobody was raving. Bless their
hearts, these of these guys know good material when they see it, and
they sense when they're being patronized.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog