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DVD Review: 300

by Jeffrey M. Anderson Jul 31st 2007 // 1:02PM

Filed under: Action, Warner Brothers, DVD Reviews, New on DVD, Home Entertainment, War



First, the good news: Zack Snyder's 300 arrives today on DVD, where its amazing visual scheme meshes more seamlessly in the home digital realm than it did with that pesky analog film element getting in the way. Like a more colorful, daylit Sin City, Snyder lacquers a computer-generated sheen over the film, thereby rendering the humans and the special effects on the same plane. No more actors glossily staring into the distance while an imaginary bad guy hovers over them; now everyone plays on an equal field. To that end, Snyder wisely avoids the usual shaky-cam technique that most directors use for their action sequences. Generally, untrained, untalented directors use this to purposely obscure their action sequences, lest the audience realize that they don't know what they're doing. With complete control of every blow, slice and decapitation, Snyder shoots with a clean, slick, almost graceful energy, highlighting and celebrating the movement of battle. My hope is that, if this movie inspires anyone to do anything, it will be to give up the shaky-cam forever and shoot more action sequences this clearly.

Onto the bad news: 300 is dangerously stupid, and its overwhelming popularity takes a disturbing x-ray of the country's mood at the moment. Its painful dialogue -- by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, based on Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's comic book -- blurts forth with a swaggering, self-important bluster, like so many humorless frat boys challenging one another at drinking contests. Everything that's said comes across as earth-shatteringly important, as if these characters from the year B.C. 480 were fully aware of how they would place in history books (even though, arguably, none of them ever saw a history book). To be certain of that, David Wenham is on hand as a soldier who narrates the tale with pomp and bravado. It's a pretty simplistic tortoise-versus-hare story: three hundred Spartan warriors, led by King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), face off against thousands of Persian soldiers, led by the evil Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro). The bravery of the few manages (for the most part) to ward off the arrogance of the many.

The main problem is that, in practice, the Spartans are just as arrogant. Lena Headey, as the Queen, has lots of dialogue about how superior Spartan men are to all other men. Indeed, Synder's Spartans spend almost every waking moment half naked, with their chiseled, sculpted, rippling male bodies gleaming. (One writer called the film "war porn," and Sarah Silverman joked that the title was a reference to how gay the film was on a scale of 1 to 10.) And the prologue shows a young boy being viciously trained as a fighter and sent out into the wild to fend for himself. One could argue that this cruelty makes a good antihero, settling into a movie full of gray areas and ambivalence, but alas this is not the case. Synder very clearly outlines his good guys and bad guys. For example, Dominic West plays a traitor, and the moment he appears onscreen, he's practically sneering; if he had a moustache, he'd twist it.

The most notable thing about 300, however, is its colossal success in the wake of the failure of so many other war films, in particular Clint Eastwood's twofer Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Eastwood is no amateur at making audiences stand up and cheer; no one with a pulse felt sorry for the thug on the other end of his famous "Go ahead... make my day" quip. But when it came time for his modern war movies, he took the grown-up route and made them complex and grim. War is hell, not fun, and he showed it with intelligence, sadness and harrowing violence. I could argue that Eastwood's morally complex tales turned off audiences, while the morally simplistic 300 did not, but it's even simpler than that. Eastwood's movies were about humans, and Snyder's is not. In Letters from Iwo Jima, we crossed our fingers and prayed that a young Japanese baker would live to get home to see his newborn child. In 300, we can barely tell one rippling pectoral muscle from the next. In short, it doesn't really matter who gets killed in 300, whereas in Eastwood's films every death -- American or Japanese -- hurts.

In any case, the new 300 DVD will no doubt capture a few more thousand viewers. Warner Home Video has released 300 in a double-disc Special Edition (as well as widescreen and full screen single-disc editions, an HD and DVD combo edition and a Blu-Ray edition). The SE comes with an audio commentary track by Snyder, co-screenwriter Johnstad and cinematographer Larry Fong. Other extras include deleted scenes, a photo gallery, three featurettes (300: Fact or Fiction, Who Were The Spartans: The Warriors of 300 and Frank Miller Tapes) and "Webisodes," behind-the-scenes peeks on the set.

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Tags: 300, cinematical, film, movie, zack snyder

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