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| Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West, David Wenham, Vincent Regan, Rodrigo Santoro |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
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Multi-angle
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King Leonidas (Gerard Butler): Persian cowards.
With the mighty Persian army, under the command of the Great King Xerxes, poised to sweep in and conquer Greece, a small band of 300 Spartan warriors - under the command of their King Leonidas - must hold the pass at Thermopylae at all costs.
 [The following review is excerpted from a longer article that can be found here]
300, Zack Snyder's immensely popular adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel, introduces changes to the book’s narrative that bring Miller’s already controversial politics to the fore much more powerfully. The book, which was first published in five installments in 1998, was never the subject of much controversy, fitting as it does in its author’s long-familiar theme of macho vigilante (super)heroes who take the law into their own hands and make a stand against forces of evil (eg. Daredevil, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City: The Hard Goodbye). But while there is little doubt in Miller’s work as to which side our sympathies should be invested in, the author does tend to leave room for ironic readings of his texts. His most celebrated work Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, for instance, casts Batman as “an older and slightly mad right-wing moralist in a dystopian Gotham City gutted by corruption and vice”. In 300, the main theme of the story is not so much the importance of defending freedom and democracy from the evils of military dictatorship — for what was Sparta if not a military dictatorship? — but the power of mythology in cementing one’s own immortality. Persian king Xerxes claims to be divine and immortal, which in his own eyes legitimizes his claim to be absolute ruler over Greece. The Spartan king Leonidas, by contrast, glorifies death in battle, which is what ultimately grants him the very immortality that Xerxes would claim for himself. By framing their battle explicitly as an oral narrative oft repeated among soldiers, the power of myth bestows upon Leonidas that which Xerxes explicitly loses at the climactic moment when he is wounded and, therefore, revealed as mortal by Leonidas’s spear.
But because the film shifts our attention away from this aspect of the story, the emphasis, and hence the controversy surrounding the film, is placed on the screenplay’s political subplot. The major turning point in the film comes not when Leonidas faces Xerxes and is granted immortality through the power of legend, but when Queen Gorgo reveals Theron as a traitor and convinces the Spartan council to support the war unambiguously. The final scene, which celebrates the impending annihilation of the Persian forces by a smaller but vastly superior Spartan army is, in the film, the result of a political process that has been interpreted by many as an allegory for contemporary American policies concerning the war in Iraq. “Theron wants to persuade the Spartan council not to send reinforcements to the desperately outnumbered 300 (what is he, a Democrat?)”, writes Dana Stevens in Slate, and her reading of the film’s political leanings is typical of many critics on both sides of the American political divide.
Film critic Walter Chaw described the film’s problems in contrast to the graphic novel most succinctly when he expressed his disappointment that the film had not “resisted the desire to turn its band of homicidal Conans into loving fathers, husbands, and defenders of the bedrock of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – albeit in the form of child abuse, brutal coming-of-age rituals, and a rejection of ideas of social responsibility and stewardship of the weak”. His analysis points out exactly where the film fails as an adaptation: the contradictions inherent in a story about a group of gung-ho militaristic white men in red capes following a dictator of their own to certain death becomes problematic when this fight is couched in overtly ideological terms that are so similar to contemporary real-world conflicts.
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300 is available on standard-definition DVD, as a two-disc edition, and also on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The Blu-Ray version houses the same extras as the SD-DVD, while the HD-DVD holds many supplements that are unique to that release, in addition to all the extras on the other two releases. The following review is based on the standard-defintion 2-disc DVD release.
The anamorphic widescreen
image is framed at an aspect ratio of approx. 2.35:1.
The Dolby
Digital 5.1 sound mix is
 The extras on this two-disc DVD kick off with director Zack Snyder's audio commentary, during which he shows off about as much insight into the film's disturbing subtext as he did during the film's promotional interviews: none. His remarks are mostly limited to pointing out which parts of the screen have been digitally manipulated and/or created, and generally enthusiastic comments about how 'cool' things look. He is joined in his childlike exuberance by writer Kurt Johnstad and cinematographer Larry Fong.
On disc 2, a cursory attempt is made to answer the first featurette's titular question 'The 300: Fact or Fiction?', which is in and of itself of course a rather ridiculous question to begin with. 'Who Were the Spartans?' is even more redundant, its running time limited to a paltry four minutes, while the similarly brief EPK featurette and 'Making 300 in images' are similarly fruitless for anyone in search of some meat-and-potatoes analysis of the film or its techniques. Much more interesting (if still rather short) is the 15-minute look at Frank Miller's career, titled 'The Frank Miller tapes'. The collection of 'webisodes' originally used for the film's promotional campaign have a combined running time of 40 minutes, and do yield some interesting nuggets for those with the patience to sit through a lot of promotional baloney.
Dan
Hassler-Forest
Reviewed:
2006
Click
here for IMDB info on 300.
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