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War is heck

300 is porn for junior militarists
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
March 21st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
"Sometimes a spear is just a spear." Gerard Butler is ripped and ready for some bloody action in 300.
The difference between Clint Eastwood’s majestically critical view of war in Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers (reviewed next week) and Zack Snyder’s ebullient war-as-blood-sport in 300 is the difference between maturity and juvenility. Where one seeks to expose the waste and barbarism of battle, the other offers porn for immature militarists.
300 is a re-imagining of the Battle of Thermopylae, when the ancient Greeks took a stand against the massive Persian host led by Xerxes I. Led by the Spartan king, Leonidas, the out-numbered Greeks slew vast numbers of their enemy before they were in turn defeated after a Greek traitor showed the Persians a secret approach to Leonidas’ camp.
300

Directed by Zack Snyder
With Gerard Butler, Rodrigo Santoro, Lena Heady, David Wenham and Dominic West

Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller (of grisly Sin City fame), 300 is a fine pop primer of ancient history for pimpled teens. Snyder’s 300 adequately serves the same purpose as a live-action video game. But, as adult fare, it’s highly questionable, if not contemptible.
The stand at Thermopylae wasn’t strictly Spartan, though the focus of 300 falls on that militantly plain kingdom. The Spartans were rugged, forthright people, who early on embraced the joys of eugenics by discarding their weak infants. As envisaged by Miller and Snyder, the overly muscular Spartan men appear most at home in forged jockstraps and crimson capes — a bizarre mixture of Marvel heroes and ’50s beefcake models from Young Physique.
After a brief biographical sketch recounting how Leonidas (Gerard Butler) became the greatest of Spartan leaders, a Persian herald arrives to inform him that the god-king Xerxes approaches, and expects nothing less than Spartan submission.
When some Gollum-like priests in the hills above Sparta warn Leonidas that their oracle advises against him going to war, the king tries to outwit destiny by not taking the full Spartan army into the field, but only himself and a crack legion of 300. They are met en route by an earnest band of less-butch Greeks who want to lend their strength to the cause.
The famous Spartan battle formation, the phalanx, wins the Greeks their first victory against the god-king’s horde. In shock, Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) deigns to materialize before Leonidas to bribe him into becoming an honored vassal. Leonidas, naturally, values independence above all else, and so the epic slaughter is on.
Through an admittedly sophisticated use of CG (unlike the dire Ghost Rider), Snyder turns the shore and crags of Thermopylae into a stage for a blood ballet. Butchery and dismemberment have seldom been so lovingly filmed, nor has the gym-tortured frames of men been so actively employed outside the confines of Honcho or Inches.
Just to make things clear, however, Snyder’s Spartans are no “Greeks.” The Athenians are early on dismissed as “boy-lovers,” while some other locker-room panic is funneled into freshman badinage such as, “Best not to have your back to the Thespians.” The Thespians (men from Thespiae, not actors under Thespis), were certainly sexually liberal (their favorite god was Eros, after all), but they were hardly jokes on history’s battlefield. They stayed with the Spartans until the bitter end, though they’ve been expunged from Snyder's story.
And this, perhaps, is one of the most distasteful aspects of this boy’s own massacre — the underlying racism and homophobia of the enterprise. The Persian “other” is a ragtag of lesbians, the handicapped, Africans and the diseased (if only every country culled its nurseries). Xerxes himself becomes a poisonous drag version of Maria Montez who’s lost his wig. But thankfully, all of our Aryan tomorrows are safe in the hands of real men.
The dialogue is primarily commanding shouts and bombast. The best lines — “Enjoy your breakfast, for tonight we dine in hell,” “Then we will fight in the shade”— were all supplied by the uncredited Herodotus.
The oldest surviving Greek play is Aeschylus’ The Persians, wherein the playwright, himself a soldier who fought against Xerxes’ army at Salamis, offered an empathetic view of the defeated Persians and their god-king after the ultimate Greek victory. Rather than crowing about a mission accomplished, the Greeks paused to acknowledge the tragedy of war and of the shared humanity of their fallen enemy. Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima accomplishes the same thing. Obviously, Snyder and his audience still think that war is “cool.” We can only hope that they grow out of it.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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