I saw the movie "300" over the weekend, and curiously enough my exact feelings are summed up in Paul Byrnes' review in the Sydney Morning Herald, so I'll quote it below:
SMH.com.au said:There must be 300 reasons to avoid this violent exercise in military propaganda.
This adaptation of the story of the 300 Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae, based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, would have Herodotus turning in his grave and Hitler rising from his.
It is violent enough to make you shudder and close enough to fascist art to make your skin crawl. It celebrates all the things the Fuehrer loved - the glorious, operatic spectacle of senseless death, the ruthless weeding out of the weak, the gross caricaturing of the enemy, the indoctrination of the young, even a mountain-climbing ordeal for the hero - and all as it purports to be a movie about freedom.
Welcome to the new double-speak: Sparta as a metaphor for America, courtesy of Warner Bros, in which the politics of eugenics is reborn amid one of the most sickeningly violent and mindless films of the new millennium. Adolf would have been pleased: he may have lost the war, but his ideas live on in mystical, military propaganda like this, aimed at spotty boys in need of heroes. God help us.
Of course, latent fascism isn't new in American military movies. It's just that it's rarely as politically naive as it is in 300. That's me being charitable. It's just possible the filmmakers intended it to be as inflammatory as it is. These are strange times and 300 fits the mood of a part of the West that would like to see the Middle-Eastern barbarians bathed in their own blood. This is their kind of movie, complete with references to "barbarians" and "Asian hordes". Perhaps the Klan has become a new demographic for Hollywood.
Much of the blame goes to Miller, who wrote the original comic and takes a credit as executive producer on the movie. He is a cult figure in the world of American comics. He revitalised Batman in the Dark Knight series, and he wrote and drew Sin City, which was turned into a popular film by Robert Rodriguez. The indisputable graphic power of Miller's comic-book art is reproduced in the film with sepia monumentalism; his politics are another thing entirely.
Much of the historical inaccuracy in the movie flows directly from his book, including the way the movie Spartans don't wear any body armour or even crests on their helmets. We don't know that much about the Spartans but we have a fair idea of what they wore in battle, and it included leg and chest plates for protection. Miller dispenses with these in favour of men in loincloths and red shawls, so we can see their rippling muscles.
These Spartans have more six packs than a butcher's picnic. David Wenham has never looked so buff as he does here, in a ridiculous role as the one-eyed historian to the Spartans. Nor, in fact, were the Persians equipped with attack elephants or giant rhinos. And unless a lot has changed since 480BC, the Persians were not as black as Nubians, either. The Persian king, Xerxes, is played as an effeminate man with an ego the size of Africa and way too much gold bling.
None of these things really matters. It's not a history lesson, as the film's preface clearly shows. The young Leonidas is sent into the wilds to fend for himself. We know the Spartans did something like this as part of their process of hardening boys into men but we take an immediate leap into fantasy when Leo faces a giant computer-generated wolf with headlight eyes. He lures the wolf into a crevice, where it becomes wedged. The boy draws back his pike and plunges it into the open mouth of the beast. Squelch!
This is the genesis of his strategy at Thermopylae. King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) will draw the army of Xerxes into the narrow pass in northern Greece where his vastly superior numbers will not help. Then the 300 brave Spartans, all that Leonidas was allowed to take from Sparta, will cut them down in waves, with superior tactics.
Herodotus, the Greek historian, tells us that this is what happened. Leonidas held off the Persians for two days at the pass, slaughtering 20,000 of their number with a disciplined defence, as Xerxes watched from a throne on a hill. The Greeks probably numbered more like 7000 at the start but let's not worry about that. This is the story of the brave 300 Spartans, not the semi-brave 6000 or more other Greeks.
The reason it's only about the Spartans is that the film seeks to glorify their martial culture, as a metaphor for America. Miller admires the toughness of their culture, in which weak babies were left to die on a mountain and boys were turned into expert killers who obeyed orders without question. Spartan men could have only one profession - soldier. Spartan women, personified in the film by the gorgeous Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), were almost as tough.
The graphic novel was first published in 1998, but there's no doubt that the film's politics have been reforged hotter by the events of September 11. Here's what Miller has said about "the enemy": "For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we're up against and the sixth-century barbarism they actually represent. These people saw people's heads off. They enslave women; they genetically (sic) mutilate their daughters. They do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I'm speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture. And I'm living in a city where 3000 of my neighbours were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built."
What Miller offers as a counter-argument is simply a much older kind of barbarism, dressed up to make the Spartans out to be freedom-lovers. Tell that to the serfs they forced into labour and the Helots they kept in line with secret police and death squads.
The Nazis took valuable lessons from Sparta so it's more than surprising to see Warner Bros, founded by four Jewish brothers, putting its resources into a movie that glorifies these ideas.
But then, it's only a comic-book movie, after all. No sense getting worked up, is there? It's only for youngsters who want a bit of blood and guts between computer games, right? No harm done.
