300 (Blu-ray)

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The Movie According to John:

Maybe the third time's the charm. I enjoyed the look of this picture in a movie theater and on standard-definition DVD, but I never engaged much with the story or characters. Now that I've had a chance to watch it yet again, this time in high-definition picture and sound, I started to like it more. Certainly, the picture's razor-sharp, 1080-resolution video and robust TrueHD audio helped a lot in my conversion.

"300," the 2006 movie adaptation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's graphic novel, is something of an audience splitter. Many people, like DVDTOWN's own Jason Vargo, loved the film; many other people, like myself, enjoyed the look of the film but longed for more substance; and still other people, like a friend with whom I went to see the movie in a theater and then later a different friend and fellow reviewer for another Web site, positively hated it. All I can figure is that while "300" may not be the world's greatest movie, it does provide an opportunity for discussion.

To begin, let me admit that when I first went to see "300," I wasn't exactly sure what I was getting into. I suppose I was looking forward to another "Sin City" type rendering of a comic book to the screen. In that regard, I got exactly what I was looking for. The movie definitely has the appearance of a comic book.

(Incidentally, I still see graphic novels as essentially comic books, no matter that they're usually more serious and often in black-and-white. As a former English teacher, it's hard for me to accept something that is mostly a series of illustrations as a "novel," with so little prose narrative involved. If there were no words at all, just pictures, would it still be a novel? Is a movie a novel? Not by traditional standards. And why am I going off on this tangent? Because the movie "300" takes a rather a nontraditional approach to filmmaking, just as the graphic novel takes a nonstandard approach to writing. Things are seldom black-and-white, even in the graphic-novel comic-book trade.)

Anyway, the film's plot, loosely based on real life and exaggerated by legend, is basically one, big battle sequence between a relatively small force of ancient Greeks from Sparta and about a gazillion invading Persians. Since there is not a lot more than that, I'll just toss out a few random thoughts about the movie in general.

I suspect that one's appreciation for this film will depend on one's tolerance for hack-and-slash. A good part of the story deals with fighting, with huge armies clashing in battle, with people slicing off one another's heads and limbs, and with a great deal of posturing from everybody involved. It's all really quite remarkable to look at, like nothing that's been done in the same way before, and in that regard it is fascinating to watch. But for how long? The movie is 116 minutes, and it seems like about 115 of those minutes involve fighting. That's hyperbole, of course, but you get the idea. I suppose if you have grown up with violent video games, you'll love the film; otherwise, it may become tiring.

Next, I found it hard not to like the film's appearance. It's meant to look like the Frank Miller graphic novel on which it's based, and it does. Done up a lot in the style of "Sin City," in that the filmmakers made it appear like black-and-white even though it's in color, "300" even stops and freezes a shot from time to time in order to remind one of the still frames in a comic book. It's quite effective the first few times you see it done, but add to that a healthy dose of slow-motion blood and gore and again, like much of the movie, it can get old fast.

Speaking of framing, the filmmakers also make sure that they block most of the shots the way they were set up in the graphic novel. We get lots of close-ups, usually with full, head-on sightings, and any number of carefully arranged group shots, usually with each frame meticulously staged and dressed for maximum symmetry.

What's more, as you know, practically the whole film was created on a soundstage, using bluescreens behind the actors, the backgrounds filled in later with computer graphics, electronic matte paintings, and such. It's the same technique that worked successfully in movies like "Sin City" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." It works fairly successfully here, too, allowing a relatively small number of actors to portray all three hundred Spartans and probably a few more actors to represent the limitless Persian army. There is never any real sense of reality to it, everything being rather flat and stagey, so just keep in mind that the filmmakers meant it to look like a flat, stagey comic book. The 300 Spartans marching off through the fields reminded me of Dorothy and her friends heading toward the Emerald City. Don't expect in "300" anything like the gorgeous location shooting we find in Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings," despite the plethora of CGI effects in both movies.

The action is all highly stylized in "300," the actors forever striking poses and the sword strokes looking both real and unreal at the same time. The characters must, after all, remind the viewer of comic-book creations, not actual, flesh-and-blood people. For that reason, every bare-chested Spartan seems to be wearing the same sort of breastplate that Ricardo Montalban wore in "The Wrath of Khan." Well, OK, either that or the filmmakers hired some really buffed-up actors to play the parts. Maybe a little of both, who knows. Moreover, for visual effect, you've got a bottomless pit in the middle of Sparta, monstrous creatures in the Persian army, and old priests looking like the Evil Emperor from "Star Wars." It helps to take these visuals with a grain of salt, assuming the filmmakers meant many of them only as reminders of the folklore of the 300 Spartans, not the actual history of the soldiers.

Which brings us to the film's lead, Gerard Butler, as the Spartan King Leonidas. Was there ever an actor to star in such a string of high-profile pictures with audiences still not being able to recognize his face? I'm willing to bet that even after his doing "Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life," "The Phantom of the Opera," "Beowulf & Grendel," and "300," most movie buffs wouldn't recognize Butler's countenance from a studio still. Not that he isn't a good actor; he proved that to my satisfaction in the little Scottish film "Dear Frankie." No, in "300" he mainly gets to do what most of the other actors in the film do--flex his considerable muscles. But because the actor plays a character with no discernable personality and because the actor wears a full beard throughout the film, who would know it was Gerard Butler? Incidentally, in several scenes the actor's Scottish accent shows through more prominently than in others, reminding one of Sean Connery and the fact that producers had considered Butler for the role of the newest James Bond.

In the end, I'd rate the movie's fancy new high-definition graphics and near-lossless sound a 9 or 10/10 and the movie's plot and characters a 5/10, rounding out to about a 7/10 overall score from me. Most important, the movie reminds us that motion pictures are, after all, about more than characters and story; movies are about visual and audio presentations as well, sights and sounds that we cannot easily experience from reading a novel or looking at a comic book. As such, this moving picture does, indeed, move.

The Details According to Dean:

Video:
"300" is a stylistic film. The CGI blood splatters and stylized hues give the film a look that is unique. "Sin City" pushed black and white to new heights with its stylistic look, but "300" does not forgo color. Instead, it just distorts the hell out of it and provides a gritty, dark and undeniabilty different viewing experience. Detail is very good and easily the best quality of the high definition transfer. The desaturated colors present a little life here and there, but they are so stylized, that "300" is a film that will never be used to show off the richness of color in a Blu-ray disc. "300" is a picture that was created to pay homage and mimic Frank Miller´s original graphic novel. It is a stylistic journey through film. It is intended to be rough and unsettling in visuals. Anytime somebody uses CGI to enhance blood and inject film grain, you are going to have a visually unsettling picture.