The first thing one notices about 300 is how brown it is. Every landscape, every physique, everything depicted seems to have been filtered through brown, much the way that a lot of Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima look steeped in slate grey. In 300, though, the effect is less, let's say, profound than in Eastwood's films. "It looks like they put the negative through a bath of tobacco juice," one waggish industry buddy noted the other day. Another colleague was not quite so amused. "It looks like s**t. Literally."
My, my. 300, adapted by director Snyder and Kurt Johnstad from a graphic novel by Frank Miller that was itself based on accounts of the 480 B.C. battle between the Spartans and the Persians at Thermopylae, is already looking to be one of the most polarizing films of the year. That's why, in my hopes of being a uniter, I've called such attention to its brown-ness — a quality I think everybody can agree on. With its massive CGI vistas and such, the picture certainly qualifies as a technical marvel even if you're not taken with its hues. Already, as I've noted elsewhere, people are weighing in on the political significance of this lionization of all things manly, which shows the good and noble and bearded Leonidas (Butler) leading his outnumbered 300 Spartans against the encroachment of a Persian army led by buff-but-kinda-sissified Xerxes (Santoro). Denials that this is some kind of policy paper in celluloid disguise are flying fast and furious; I've argued elsewhere that, whatever political analogs one wishes to draw aside, the picture's grandiosity, worship of bloodshed and valorization of the old "dulce est decorum est" credo — not to mention its utter humorlessness — are all in keeping with what can only be called a fascist aesthetic. (I'm not even going to get into the weirdness of this movie's homoerotica and homophobia getting into bed together as they do.) I know, I know — "Never mind that," a lot of you might be thinking; "how does it work as an action movie?" Well that's the damnedest thing, and it does kind of tie in with fascist aesthetics as well, particularly its fondness for tableaux. You know how a still from a classic action movie — The Seven Samurai, The Wild Bunch, Die Hard, your own favorite, take your pick — only conveys so much of what that movie has to offer in terms of action? That while a still can give a sense of how cool stuff is, it's only in experiencing the kinetic kick of the 24-frames-a-second stuff that really makes it? When you look at any random still from 300, you get all that it has to offer (minus the ear-splitting sound, sure). It really is a series of elaborate tableaux strung together rather than a moving thing that simulates an organic sense of being caught up in life-or-death conflict. That it's so flat as an action movie probably has a lot to do with why people might prefer to jawbone over its putatively controversial aspects — there's really not much of a "wow" factor to revel in.
