The Spartans On The CGI-Wet Rock

[March 7th, 2007] Only the hard and the strong can call themselves Spartan," the narrator of 300 intones as the red-robed troops march off to battle. And then, in case anyone in the audience was blowing her nose, or suffering from narcolepsy, he adds: "Only the hard. Only the strong."

It turns out that the people of Greece have just one weakness: repetition. "No retreat," announces their King Leonidas. "No surrender. That is Sparta." Actually, that's a Bruce Springsteen song, but sure, I guess it can also be Sparta. After all, these are the people who minted that whole return with your shield or on it bit, and they did send 300 of their finest warriors to the Battle of Thermopylae to hold off Xerxes' vastly superior Persian forces in 480 B.C. I don't think Xerxes was in fact employing a gargantuan rhinoceros, several homicidal mutants and an executioner who moonlighted as Lobster Boy—but that's Frank Miller for you, and he wrote the graphic novel 300, so there's no sense quibbling.

The trouble with 300, not to put too fine a point on it, it that it contains no sense at all. The sacrifice at Thermopylae has, over the years, been refitted as a symbol for many purposes. (Personally, I'm inclined toward the poet A.E. Houseman's resigned take: "And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning./ The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.") But director Zack Snyder (who last helmed the Dawn of the Dead remake) uses the tale the same way every action movie uses a story in the digital age: as an excuse for spectacular effects. Perhaps the only director to avoid kowtowing to his graphics has been Robert Rodrieguez, whose adaptation of another Miller comic, Sin City, preferred style to grandiosity. The burnished CGI on display is certainly jaw-dropping, with literal waves of bodies and arrows blackening the sky, but each visual crescendo is piled atop another crescendo, and the end effect is numbing. The plot of 300 doesn't so much build as it hypertrophies.

The movie is not without its virtues. It is, if nothing else, the first film in some time to recognize the ancient definitions of honor in all their unsentimental power, with no regard for modern qualms about violence. (Nobody here is dying for 21st-century lingo.) But everything good about it is sacrificed to the technical wizardry. And what's more distressing is that the laborious nature of the effects has seeped into every aspect of the filmmaking. Nothing here is gracefully offhand; it all looks like damned hard work—difficult to the point of silly. Everyone from the fight choreographer to the music composer to Leonidas himself (a well-oiled Gerard Butler) is repeatedly sweating and straining. There's no room for grace or entertainment when all hands are pushing so manfully. Only the hard is allowed—and the Spartans don't even have the dignity to comb their hair.