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When abs go wild.
Went and saw a late IMAX showing of 300 last night with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ginkgo. Was oddly not as drawn into it as I thought I would be. I think I kept thinking about the apparent irate Iranian public response to the movie, and saw it through that filter, which is unfortunate.
The best way to describe this movie is "fever-dream". It's not the telling of a historical event, it's an epic tale told around a campfire among soldiers. I caught an interview with the director, Zack Snyder, on NPR, and he said that that was his model... and he nailed it. Everything is larger than life, intensified, and focussed on the tiniest of details and actions as you would find in an oral telling. Even the pacing of the fight scenes reminded me of this, how a storyteller will stretch time to give you a plethora of minutia during a moment of action or decisiveness.
I've read reviews that said the use of slo-mo was overused and amateur. I disagree. While it is over-used in general, and I'm not a big fan of it, it actually made sense in this film given the intent of the director. It's too bad that some reviewers missed that, I thought it rather obvious.ginkgo also mentioned that there's only so much you can do with a fight involving swords and spears. Flipping between fast and slow gives it a cadence that it wouldn't have otherwise.
OTOH, I felt the pacing was a bit too slow - it wasn't the pulse-pounder I was sort of expecting. Of course,ginkgo pegged it again when she said "I don't know, it made it feel more like the methodical, inevitable death-march that it was." She's right, that was how it felt - I think I've been warped by most modern action flicks into a tempo of ACTION-longpause-ACTION-ACTION-ACTION-end, and this was more (ACTION-pause)*-end. It definitely gave a feeling of "Here comes another wave - great" after a while, but even with that, it never got *boring*. But xXx or Die Hard, it wasn't. No big pulse-pounder sequence that builds to a crescendo, but instead a... death-march. Which was the right way to go.
There were, however, even amongst the blood and gore (which was highly stylized and surprisingly non-gory given the weapons of the day), a few excellent humorous moments thrown in. At one point, while his men are systematically slaughtering the wounded on the battlefield despite their pleas for mercy, Leonidas is munching on a crisp apple, and told of an approaching envoy from the Persians. He goes to meet it, and when warned against it by his Captain, shrugs and says, with a mouthful of apple "The least we can do is be civil." Of course, it comes out as "Da weest we cun do ith be thivil" as spittle and chunks fly out, because his mouth his full. As his men are killing helpless wounded begging for their lives. And...ginkgo pointed out that apples came from Persia. There's a good chance that Leonidas got the apple by pilfering it from the dead. So not *only* do you get him talking about civility with his mouth full in a highly ironic surrounding, but his mouth is full because he stole some poor bastard's lunch. Gotta love it.
This does bring up an important point though - the morality in the film is completely relativistic. You cheer for the Spartans on one hand, while the modern ethics sits in the back and tut-tuts the entire while. The efficient and ruthless killing of the wounded is just business as usual, it's just what is done, no questions asked. The jingoistic militarism will annoy the hell out of some folks, and please the hell out of others. Frankly, it's not really my style, but as the ads say "THIS IS SPARTA!" That's kind of how they really *were*. A number of people will make parallels between this and current politics and what we're doing in the name of freedom on home soil. Yeah, you can make those. You can also point out that this film is highly critical of the current politics at the same time, in a wonderfully subtle way. (There's a beautiful line tossed in by Da Eebil Politician at one point when another character is waxing eloquent about the sacrifice in blood of the King and his men to preserve freedom at home: "All men are *not* created equal, isn't that the foundation of the Spartan way?" Which is dead on, and rather derails in a neat way any attempt to draw a parallel between Sparta under threat, and say, the US.) If you go see this, do try and check your politics at the door. They'll just get in the way, no matter what your views. Perhaps that's just inevitable when you make a film about what you would do, and what you would sacrifice to defend your home - everyone would do it differently.
In the end, it's a gorgeously executed film that, in my opinion, does a damned good job of presenting an epic legend. It's not a historical documentary, it's a soldier's yarn about a moment in history where the actions of a tiny few really did alter the course of history for centuries to come.
ginkgo. Was oddly not as drawn into it as I thought I would be. I think I kept thinking about the apparent irate Iranian public response to the movie, and saw it through that filter, which is unfortunate.The best way to describe this movie is "fever-dream". It's not the telling of a historical event, it's an epic tale told around a campfire among soldiers. I caught an interview with the director, Zack Snyder, on NPR, and he said that that was his model... and he nailed it. Everything is larger than life, intensified, and focussed on the tiniest of details and actions as you would find in an oral telling. Even the pacing of the fight scenes reminded me of this, how a storyteller will stretch time to give you a plethora of minutia during a moment of action or decisiveness.
I've read reviews that said the use of slo-mo was overused and amateur. I disagree. While it is over-used in general, and I'm not a big fan of it, it actually made sense in this film given the intent of the director. It's too bad that some reviewers missed that, I thought it rather obvious.
ginkgo also mentioned that there's only so much you can do with a fight involving swords and spears. Flipping between fast and slow gives it a cadence that it wouldn't have otherwise.OTOH, I felt the pacing was a bit too slow - it wasn't the pulse-pounder I was sort of expecting. Of course,
ginkgo pegged it again when she said "I don't know, it made it feel more like the methodical, inevitable death-march that it was." She's right, that was how it felt - I think I've been warped by most modern action flicks into a tempo of ACTION-longpause-ACTION-ACTION-ACTION-end, and this was more (ACTION-pause)*-end. It definitely gave a feeling of "Here comes another wave - great" after a while, but even with that, it never got *boring*. But xXx or Die Hard, it wasn't. No big pulse-pounder sequence that builds to a crescendo, but instead a... death-march. Which was the right way to go.There were, however, even amongst the blood and gore (which was highly stylized and surprisingly non-gory given the weapons of the day), a few excellent humorous moments thrown in. At one point, while his men are systematically slaughtering the wounded on the battlefield despite their pleas for mercy, Leonidas is munching on a crisp apple, and told of an approaching envoy from the Persians. He goes to meet it, and when warned against it by his Captain, shrugs and says, with a mouthful of apple "The least we can do is be civil." Of course, it comes out as "Da weest we cun do ith be thivil" as spittle and chunks fly out, because his mouth his full. As his men are killing helpless wounded begging for their lives. And...
ginkgo pointed out that apples came from Persia. There's a good chance that Leonidas got the apple by pilfering it from the dead. So not *only* do you get him talking about civility with his mouth full in a highly ironic surrounding, but his mouth is full because he stole some poor bastard's lunch. Gotta love it.This does bring up an important point though - the morality in the film is completely relativistic. You cheer for the Spartans on one hand, while the modern ethics sits in the back and tut-tuts the entire while. The efficient and ruthless killing of the wounded is just business as usual, it's just what is done, no questions asked. The jingoistic militarism will annoy the hell out of some folks, and please the hell out of others. Frankly, it's not really my style, but as the ads say "THIS IS SPARTA!" That's kind of how they really *were*. A number of people will make parallels between this and current politics and what we're doing in the name of freedom on home soil. Yeah, you can make those. You can also point out that this film is highly critical of the current politics at the same time, in a wonderfully subtle way. (There's a beautiful line tossed in by Da Eebil Politician at one point when another character is waxing eloquent about the sacrifice in blood of the King and his men to preserve freedom at home: "All men are *not* created equal, isn't that the foundation of the Spartan way?" Which is dead on, and rather derails in a neat way any attempt to draw a parallel between Sparta under threat, and say, the US.) If you go see this, do try and check your politics at the door. They'll just get in the way, no matter what your views. Perhaps that's just inevitable when you make a film about what you would do, and what you would sacrifice to defend your home - everyone would do it differently.
In the end, it's a gorgeously executed film that, in my opinion, does a damned good job of presenting an epic legend. It's not a historical documentary, it's a soldier's yarn about a moment in history where the actions of a tiny few really did alter the course of history for centuries to come.