300 (2007)

	Directed by: Zack Snyder	COUNTRY USA GENRE Action/War/Historical/ Fantasy/Adventure NORWEGIAN TITLE 300 RUNNING TIME 117 minutes
	Produced by: Mark Canton Bernie Goldman Gianni Nunnari Jeffrey Silver
	Written by (based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller): Zack Snyder Kurt Johnstad Michael B. Gordon

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
King Leonidas	Gerard Butler
Queen Gorgo	Lena Headey	½
Theron	Dominic West	½
Dilios	David Wenham
Captain	Vincent Regan
Stelios	Michael Fassbender	½
Xerxes	Rodrigo Santoro

Review

From a long list of sword-and-sandal movies, and an even longer list of films from the revived fantasy genre combined, 300 is the most banal and annoying of them all. I remember when a history student friend told me the story about the 300 Spartans. His rendition sent shivers down my spine, and he didn't use a single special effect. Zack Snyder's version hardly features one scene without a special effect, and the film still feels strangely insignificant.

Based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, one would expect that the end result would contain some of the flair and courage of Robert Rodriguez' Sin City, but Snyder's 300 is all about roars, crudeness and testosterone. He might as well have parked his car outside the cinema and burned his rubber for two hours. The film is utterly uncreative in its execution – every line, every character and every plot twist is a bad carbon copy from the ultimate B-movie template. It's not even well-done from a technical point of view: The non-dynamic CGI graphics look like muddy canvases, and the sound editing leaves everything to be desired (what's up with the voice of Xerxes?).

It is painfully clear that Snyder's objective here is exclusively to be as stylized and cool as possible. Unfortunately, he forgets the most important aspect of this objective in the process – the main reason another "cool" filmmaker succeeded in exactly this mission last decade: dialogue. In 300, the dialogue is thoroughly and painfully lowbrow – to a degree that it sometimes makes lines from the Rambo films sound Shakespearian. Miller's novels are often hailed for their subtlety and clever writing. 300 has nothing of this. What it does have, however, is a narcissistic, unhumorous immaturity that is meant to appeal to the viewers' "my-dad-is-stronger-than-your-dad" instinct. The effect is dull at best and offensive at worst. Snyder manages to tone down or omit the most important aspects the battle had in the first place: the strategies and the shrewdness that made this feat possible for the Spartans.

Genre buffs might get fooled by the alleged artistic stylization or the relentless special effects into thinking this is a good film. But underneath the shallow shell hides a cowardly, insignificant little film with obsolete and ridiculously one-dimensional characterizations of heroes and villains. A film that unaffectedly presents Persians as plain, slave-holding barbarians, and that thinks it has something important to say about democracy, bravery and heroism – a simplistic and conceited worldview that is all too manifested in the current political situation in the world for this film to be anything but nauseating.