Going to See 300- a few thoughts

The wife and I got a date night about two weeks ago. We had dinner at Domo in Muncie (she loves sushi) and I talked her into seeing 300. I must admit that I read the graphic novel years, and had seen The 300 Spartans decades ago (which also inspired Frank Miller in writing his graphic novel). We got there late and sat almost in the front seat.

I liked the movie but I did not love it. I liked the movie a whole lot more than Sin City (which I also read as a graphic novel and still like a lot). Sin City seemed like the director had just photographed the graphic novel, people stuck poses, and in the end they just did not move. They call them movies for a reason.

I did not get the same feeling of actors striking poses but some that kind of stiffness popped up from time to time. Some of the problems I had with the graphic novel - elephants, piercings, some of the other weirdness, the ephors - remain in the movie. Okay, 300 is not history but historical. So not bad, but if you got the graphic novel I got to say this: wait till the thing is out on DVD and re-read the graphic novel while you wait. Even better - read Herodotus.

Then today I read two articles on the movie. One put my qualms about the movie into perspective for me. The other reminded me that I had overlooked some flaws because I had read Herodotus and knew a bit of ancient Greek history.

Stephen Hunter writes in today's Washington Post under the headline, From Here to Thermopylae, In Fred Zinnemann's Sure Hands, '300' Would Have Cut a Deeper. The following paragraph articulated my qualms with 300:

But there's a deeper difference that is not only enabled by the technology, but sits right at the border between old school and new school. It's what Zinnemann (and possibly film fans of my generation) would find and do find so annoying about "300." For Zinnemann, the point of the movie was to pretend it wasn't a movie -- it was real, it was happening, it was there. You were looking at the actual through a magic pane of glass, a window in the side of the universe. This is even true of his most stylized work, the musical "Oklahoma!," where he effortlessly segues between the stylized dance numbers and the real-world setting.

Mr. Hunter unleashes his whimsy in the article but I think he illustrates a problem with some modern movies. Or is it just adapting Frank Miller stories? The same cannot be said of Batman Begins (the flaws in that movie belong to a different problem of modern movies - the "let's blow something up because we just ran short of ideas" problem.). I disagree with only one item - as much as I think Burt Lancaster was great (and Hunter does mention one of my favorite Lancaster movies - The Professionals), Butler does seem to me a Spartan.

Hunter also reminded me of the history that is not mentioned in the movie. The facts of the case, as it were. History which the Sunday Herald reviewer did not seem to know when he called the Spartans fascistic. Yep, they were. All the Greeks had slaves but the Spartans ran a particularly nasty system and had to be prepared for a revolt. The Spartans were not a democracy but they were orderly. That orderliness attracted our founders more than Athenian democracy which was sloppy and often descended into demagoguery. Athens gave us democracy, Leonidas gave the Athens time to defeat the Persians, and a great story of heroism. Let us not exalt the Spartans more than they deserve.