I finally saw 300 on Sunday. It was just as good as I expected. And my expectations were high.
There are a few idiot reviewers showing off their ability to read an encyclopaedia article on Thermopylae and decrying the film for this or that inaccuracy. The point is that this is a story elevated to the level of myth, of heroes doing awe-inspiring things. And we are so jaded, seeing miracles with every visit to the cinema, that "merely" showing the courage, bravery and discipline of the Greeks over those three days wouldn't satisfy viewers who think that of course heroes can beat hundred-to-one odds. So we see rhinoceroses and elephants; Xerxes becomes a towering, androgynous Latin American; arrows truly do blot out the sun; the earth really does shake beneath the feet of the eastern armies. The pedants are like art critics in 1874 complaining that Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" didn't look realistic enough. This is cinematic impressionism.
There are small weaknesses. The old Vietnam-war-movie problem of "who is who under the helmet" means that the enemy tend to be signalled by making them as foreign from the Greeks* as possible: The Persian Empire thus ends up very African in character (insert western-centric tinfoil-hat theory here). Delios' (Faramir's) accent is awkward and stilted. In such a battle, brutality and blood must be represented, but a couple of decapitations
are lingered over for too long. And the director decided that the ladies needed more time with Queen Gorgas on screen, which means several utterly unnecessary cuts back to Sparta.
Fortunately, the bit at home is utterly unrelated to everything that goes on in the rest of the film, so, when watching on DVD, it will be a matter of pressing the skip button once and you're back to the battle. Since the rest of the movie is basically a shot-for-shot filiming of the book, the sub-plot about Gorgas that is tacked on has not managed, through some hideous process of angiogenesis, to infiltrate and corrupt the "proper" movie.
The other bit that annoyed me in a purely pedantic way is that the Spartans only fight "properly" - in a phalanx - once. The first fight is amazing, with the clash, the press of spears and co-ordinated movement of the Spartans immensely atmospheric. The other fight scenes degenerate into one-on-ones that the Persians could only have dreamt of them engaging in. Greek hoplite battles against lighter opponents were sometimes unusual in that the enemy's rout could be the time when most Greek losses occurred. This happened at Marathon. But I admit that a film full of grindingly realistic phalanx warfare would have been tedious.
And, putting that aside, the way that the battle scenes use variable speed of playback to present very beautiful recreations of forms from friezes and from
black- and red-figure pottery is spectacular and moving, barring only the odd gratuitous decapitation. The placement and poses of the actors in the scene of Leonidas' return with the wolf is like seeing a scene from the
Elgin Marbles come back to life. This evocation impressed me more than anything else about the brilliantly exquisite cinematography.
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*To those who complain that the Greeks didn't look anything like Greeks: do they really believe that 2,500 years of population movements, of invasions and occupation by Macedonians, Romans, Goths, Bulgars, Ottomans and more have left the Greek appearance untouched? Leonidas looked damnably close to typical Greek black-figure pottery heroes.