It took five years, but it happened. I have finally seen a movie in theaters that is worse than Panic Room, the awful David Fincher film that not even the brilliant Forest Whitaker could redeem. I remember leaving the Douglas 3 (rest in peace) tasting a little bile on my upper palate--that bad.
So which movie stole the crown from Panic Room? The answer is 300, a film based on a graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller. This thing was an awful, stinking, steaming heap, that seems better suited for the bottom of my toilet bowl than for the big screen. When I saw this movie was awful, I'm not exaggerating: I would have walked out had it been possible, but I was in mixed company.
And what made 300 so bad? Before I offer my humble opinion, I'll share a few from some others:
- The New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, described 300 as "about as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid."
- Wesley Morris wrote: "the film never feels like more than an exercise, for the filmmakers and the actors."
- Robby Eksiel said moviegoers would be dazzled by the "digital action" but irritated by the "pompous interpretations and one-dimensional characters."
This movie is terrible. It's misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic and shallow. it's decidedly anti-female and conflates a lot of different ideas about the meaning of war, the meaning of glory, and the bigger meaning of just what it is to be a free human. And speaking of 'freedom,' if I had heard the word one more time, I'm not sure what I would have done. Let's just say I'm glad there were no loaded guns nearby because I was ready to end it--for myself, that is. I vote that word be stricken from the dictionary. There is no more use for it in the English language if it is going to be mutilated as badly as this.
By the end of the film, the viewer has no real attachment to any characters because the plot is just that shallow--character development is so thin that after the protagonist finally dies (via arrows and swords), there is no reason to blink an eye, and I'm fairly sure that no one in the audience did. The movie present no tangible emotion to latch on to. No glory and no freedom and no honor. No love--not even the Hollywood style love thrown in to draw the plot strings just a bit tighter. No, not even that.
There is only death and violence, and on that level the movie succeeds: it presents super-stylized massacres with some neat filming tricks that really create a comic book feel that is mesmerizing to watch. I have to admit, the first few battle scenes were great, but then I realized the entire movie was a battle scene, and I was literally snoring. So I guess mesmerizing isn't the right word, perhaps, 'hypnotized into a comatose state,' would be better.
When it's all over we forget where we started, what we learned, and what the overall point was. The movie had phenomenal potential but was ultimately ruined by lack of a cogent plot, lack of real characters viewers can identify with, and of course it's blatantly misogynistic and borderline racist motifs. The logic and rhetoric in this film was so confusing and contradictory that I can't imagine the way it must have made all the fourteen-year-old boys in the theater feel.
Sickening. I should have listened to Walker, who summed it up much better than I did when he said, "Don't go see that movie. It sucks."
Update: God I fucking hated this movie. I can't even say any more, but I also can't stop thinking about it, so instead of typing, I'm just going to let others much more qualified than myself do the talking:
From A.O. Scott at the New York Times:
The big idea, spelled out over and over in voice-over and dialogue in case the action is too subtle, is that the free, manly men of Sparta fight harder and more valiantly than the enslaved masses under Xerxes’ command. Allegory hunters will find some gristly morsels of topicality tossed in their direction, but you can find many of the same themes, conveyed with more nuance and irony, in a Pokémon cartoon.
From the New York Post:
As 300 doomed warriors of ancient Sparta march into the Battle of Thermopylae against hundreds of thousands of Persians, the movie version of the Frank Miller (“Sin City”) comic book becomes less a salute to the “Braveheart” school of right-wing action movies than a parody of them. Its philosophical underpinnings are not freedom and courage but Itchy and Scratchy.
But keeping in mind Slate's Mickey Kaus' Hitler Rule - never compare anything to Hitler - it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a "300" screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again.
And finally, probably the best article comes courtesy of the Star-Ledger. Here's an excerpt:
...like so many post 9/11 films -- whether it's the happy Hobbit epics of Peter Jackson or the mad mythmaking of "Alexander" -- "300" casts this as a parable of East vs. West, with the East standing for all that is decadent and barbarian, and the West for everything that is democratic and civilized.
It's Saturday-matinee xenophobia.
The Greeks are all manly men who courageously fight half-naked, swinging broadswords; the Persian Army is made up of Africans, Asians and Arabs, "endless hordes" from "the darkest corners" of the empire, fighting with cowardly bows and arrows and bombs. Their leaders are swarthy, and have the reverberating voices of monsters; their king is a seven-foot drag queen.
There is no question, of course, as to whom we are supposed to root for.
brett at 09:30 AM on March 13, 2007 | Permalink
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