300

[robin_d_laws]

The elements I liked about 300 were sufficiently cool that I wanted to buy into the flick completely. Couldn’t quite get there, though. Part of the problem is structural; the climax occurs at the end of the first act. Mainly, though, I kept being tossed out of the movie by the excessive use of voice-over. I understand the desire to be faithful to

Comments

[sorceror]

Was the voiceover part of the original comic?

On another note, stolen from a comment by the_columbian:

[prodigal]

Yes, it was in captions on the page.

[whisper_jeff]

Given that it was a dramatized pep talk from Dilios, don't you think it's important that we hear what he's telling the soldiers? If we just see the events unfold, it would come across as the actual events that happened rather than a reminder that what we are seeing is the tale told - it reminds us that it is a story from one soldier told to his compatriots.

Normally, I would agree that voiceovers of that degree are wrong on every level but, given the structure of the story, I think they make perfect sense.

[robin_d_laws]

They are necessary but could have been pared way back, especially the ones describing the action.

[whisper_jeff]

While I'm not advocating more voiceover (in the least...), I think it was important during the action to remind the viewer that the action being portrayed is still a story being told and thus is suspect.

It certainly didn't bother me as much as you but I do agree that a bit less voiceover could have accomplished the same task without being quite as intrusive.

[drivingblind]

It wasn't the voiceover that took me out of it -- it was the excessive use of slow-mo.

[wordwill]

As a guy who normally bad-mouths slo-mo (hey, do you know what yanked me out of every [i]Lord of the Rings[/i] movie by one of the cheesiest directors working today?), in 300 I think it's used brilliantly, not only to demonstrate the clarity the Spartans have in battle -- slo-mo for clarity, bursts of full-speed for chaos -- but the side-angle full-body shots coupled with the slo-mo create this great sense of old Greek dramatic registers. Imagine these actors rendered in orange inks on a black background, old school. The ability for these guys to not only perform this action, but to arrive at these precise and idealized poses along the way, is worth showing off in slo-mo. In fact, it's the only way to show it off, really.

-w

[drivingblind]

I hear what you're saying, but for me, in 300, the slow motion said to me "Okay, now we're going to look at another still shot because the director has a huge crush on the graphic novel format but he got stuck doing a movie instead, and the movie has this annoying tendency to be full of things that MOVE".

[wordwill]

You think Zach Snyder went out of his way to be responsible for $60 million in studio money on a movie when what he really wanted to do was a sequel to the graphic novel?

[sadrx]

In giving a one-word review of the film on an LJ community, I chose "false-reality," mostly for what you've pointed out here.

I used it as a triple-entendre. First, for the obvious fantasy nature. Second, for the folding -- the embedded unreliable narrator who was even absent for a part he narrates. Third, though, for sticking too faithfully to the graphic novel frames and failing to establish the visual environment in the majority of scenes. This isn't something you brought up but something I think is a major fault of the movie, along the lines of leaving in too much voice-over. Rodriguez did it right in Sin City, but it seems this Snyder guy just couldn't appropriately turn the comic book scenes into a film storyboard. The shots played out like I was panning across the pages of a comic, and that didn't work so well on the big screen.

300 -- Fox News

[rsdancey]

Robin, your Fox News comment is 100% on the mark

Re: 300 -- Fox News

[robertprior]

See this article for further trashing:

http://www.thestar.com/article/190493

Re: 300 -- Fox News

[sorceror]

1) The Spartans were not the paragons of "freedom" as described in the movie. They enslaved the Helots, who did most of the work of actually running the Spartan city-state, which is why the Spartan men were able to specialize as warriors. Freedom, to a Spartan, was a virtue limited to other Spartans, not to people as a whole (or even Greeks as a group.)

Yep. The same could be said of the ancient Romans.

In fact, it could also be said of Revolutionary America.

Anyway, a friend told me that the movie is wrong on other counts beyond these and the Toronto Star article. Apparently the battle was the end result of a campaign that was a catalog of blunders: Leonidas was actually leading a large pan-Greek army, but realized at the last minute that he'd screwed up and set them up for annihilation. So he ordered the main body of the army to escape to fight another day while he and his 300 Spartans + over 700 other Greeks held off Xerxes at Thermopylae.

And of course, there's the inconvenient fact that Greece was *really* saved by the (