300

Directed By Zack Snyder
Written By Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad, Michael Gordon
Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West, Rodrigo Santoro
Duration: 116 Minutes

Continuing with the veracious comic-to-screen adaptation process pioneered by Robert Rodriguez with Sin City, yet another of Frank Miller’s dynamic and brutal graphic novels serves as the visual inspiration for a cinematic counterpart. It’s the sophomore effort for filmmaker Zack Snyder, who remade George Romero’s zombie epic Dawn of the Dead in 2002, which despite bearing little resemblance to its predecessor, featured solid performances and slick gore laden action which went a long way towards proving Snyder’s cinematic chops.

With his latest film, Snyder has given three dimensions to Frank Miller’s graphic novel, 300. It’s set in the ancient Greek state of Sparta, where newborn males were scrutinised for imperfections and deformities. If any were found, the infants would be tossed from a cliff. Such brutal eugenics were commonplace at the time. If a young boy was lucky enough to survive his birth and reach 7 years of age, he would be then be taken from his mother and given to the state. They would then undergo agoge, a kind of military training. By the age of 20, they would be worthy to serve as Spartan soldiers, fully formed killing machines, bred for battle.

The film begins in 480 B.C as a Persian invasion force of several hundred thousand men threatens Greece. The Persian Empire promises autonomy to the peoples it conquers and dispatches messengers to all states to personally request that Greece yield to Xerxes, its ‘God-King’. The Spartan senate is hesitant to acquiesce and endlessly debates whether to fight, so the single minded Spartan King Leonidas (Butler) decides to take matters into his own hands and travels north with 300 of his best warriors to a narrow mountain pass called Thermopylae in order to hold off the gargantuan Persian onslaught and buy time for Greece to rally for war.

It’s at this point that the film launches into demented overdrive, putting the audience front and centre as the Spartans utterly rout a motley array of battle scarred mutants, crazed psychopathic uber-warriors and wave after wave of intricately costumed soldiers from every corner of the Persian Empire. As the killing progresses, the Spartan’s build their defensive wall higher and higher, using the enemy corpses as mortar between the stones, all the time living in the hope of a ‘good death’ and the possibility that within the multitudes they are slaughtering there may be a warrior worthy enough to provide them with one.

Shot digitally and utilising ‘green screen’, the film is visually stunning, its painterly vistas and ball-tearing battle sequences are realised with a bent towards the hyper-real, surreal touches which are lifted directly from the pages of Miller’s comic: Leper Oracle’s, obese mutants with blades for arms, facially scarred lesbian concubines, rounded out by the multi-pierced, multi-jeweled Xerxes of Persia, whose voice is of such uncommonly rich timbre that even Ghostbuster’s Gozer would be envious. The battle scenes move with muscular dynamism and intensity, punctuated with some stunningly graphic violence. All the while the camera floats through the butchery, speeding up and slowing down at key moments of impact. Blood arcs gracefully through the air as spears puncture and swords rent limb from limb. Such choreographed killing is a sight to behold and in the midst of it, the cast delivers steroidal performances. Wenham is back in Rings territory as the battle worn Dilios, Leonidas’ trusted confidante and it’s through his eyes that the story is told. The cast uniformly oozes the requisite machismo and brute force; their physiques a testament to the extensive fitness regime that they underwent in preparation for the film. Alone in this raging testosterone sea is one island of femininity: Headey in the surprisingly pivotal role of Spartan Queen Gorgo. It’s her story that provides the background to the battle, when she‘s pitted against the Machiavellian Theron (West) as she pressures the senate to go to war and support her husband but it’s Butler as King Leonidas who delivers the standout performance, carrying the film in what will no doubt be his breakout role.

Snyder isn’t aiming to appeal to the masses here, in fact it’s a fairly specific slice of the demographic pie that 300 is squarely leveled at and to that end the film excels. Essentially the anti-Bridget Jones Diary or rather the kryptonite to Dirty Dancing’s Superman; the hard edged, gloriously unsentimental brutality is so damn cool, so slickly designed and executed, it will inexorably call to the 18-35 male like a siren song drenched in arterial spray.