As a confirmed history buff, film aficionado and occasional graphic novel reader, could I afford not to see a movie that purported to combine all three. The online trailers and promos only served to heighten my natural interest, tossing out lines straight from Herodotus' wonderful ancient history text. I had not (and still haven't) seen the graphic novel of the same name, but as I lined up at the ticket counter on opening day, I thought to myself, "You can't ruin this story."
And you really can't. While the film doesn't exactly do that, it does fail to measure up to its historic roots, and for me that is one of the greatest crimes so many films based on historical events commonly commit. One always hopes that the next film incarnation will have "learned from the past" and correct the mistakes of others. But they never do. More's the pity.
The counter-argument is, of course, that the film is not actually based on historic events, it's based on a graphic novel that's...you get the picture.
Most of the reviews I have read agree on one thing--the film is visually stunning. No argument there. From the digitally dropped backgrounds (this is mostly blue-screen artwork) to the graded coloration to the creative camera work to the fine pectoral specimens prancing with wicked helmets and long red capes, the combined effect is breath-taking.
Speaking of pecs and abs. Most of the Spartan characters in the film were fine imitations of Greek art in sculpture. I did respect and appreciate that aspect of this homage to physical perfection with which the Greeks were obsessed and which still dominates a lot of American advertising. Historically accurate Cheesecake, perhaps? One can trace a direct line from these Spartans to the super-heroes that adorn comic book shelves, grace our Saturday mornings and increasingly find their way into the film canon.
Sadly, however, all the best lines in the movie are straight from Herodotus. The other lines, the layers and layers of cheese used to pad the spartanly spare script, were laughable at the least and wildly inaccurate as representations of ancient Greek, much less Spartan, values.
The cheesy lines represent only one aspect in which I found the film, and possibly therefore the graphic novel, to be negligent and even bad.
I was fascinated by Thermopylae as a young teenager. I read Herodotus then (don't ask) and quite a few other versions of the story. I always imagined that this particular tale would make an incredible film someday. The script practically wrote itself, I thought.
Well, it didn't. The running B-plot of the king's wife trying to start a grass-roots campaign of support back home was a transparent and ridiculously shallow attempt to do two things: give a woman a part in the story and provide some sort of narrative relief from the relentless carnage at the pass. Because it is so historically improbable, it does violence to history and therefore had to be completely made-up. So it flops as a theme. Badly. And that just didn't have to happen. The conflict at home--which was real--could have followed historical lines and been more effective. The fact was that all the "free" Greek cities had agreed to the deal to send the Spartan forelorn hope out there. Everyone knew they weren't going to get any help. It was a delaying action at best and probably a suicide mission from the start. That could have been played up better, but wasn't.
The characters, as most reviewers have noted, are cardboard. This is not a problem for the Spartans because their more endearing qualities historically were that they were uncomplicated, brutal, supremely religious, dogged and unimaginative. They were, in fact, the most efficient fascist state there has ever been. They weren't known for nice. Miller and crew actually have to make them look a little more palatable by tossing some Athenian ideas into their heads and mouths, ideas the real Spartans would have found contemptible.
The morph of Xerxes into a giant androgynous being with an echoing cavern of a voice and an infinity of piercings is one of the more unfortunate creative choices of the work. Even as a grand metaphor for absolutism it falls flat. Sparta was a near absolutist state itself. Spartans, and most other Greeks including the Athenians, did not object to tyrants in principle, only to the foreign variety.
I hate to say that I even found the battle scenes tiresome after a while. The first flush of combat, ending with driving the baddies (exotic dark-skinned people all) over the cliff was pretty cool. After that, even I came to welcome the brief respites of the lame B-plot, if only to get a rest from the stylishly grisly, slo-mo slaughter.
The larger problem of this piece of art, however, is that it cannot simply be taken as a visual masterpiece, for all art is rhetorical. All art has something to say. And once you peel back the pasted on veneer of "freedom" (the same pasted on ideal for Braveheart and Gladiator), what you get is an ambivalent story open to abusive appropriation. It's not hard to imagine, for instance, that Hitler would have loved this movie.
Before you recoil in shock, think it through. Who gets kicked into the Spartan well? Who gets rejected from the Spartan ranks? Who gets mocked? Who gets sliced and diced in every conceivable way? Strong, heterosexual white men? Hmmm. As I said before, Sparta was really the first fascist state. What we have here, with the sole exception of the obligatory anachronistic disrespect for religion, is as right-wing a statement as you could ask for, if a right-winger was interested in adopting it.
I doubt that Frank Miller is such a person. He would probably be horrified by the suggestion. But the real Spartans were not defenders of much more than a distinct culture (a couple of wonderful throwaway lines nonetheless) that none of us currently would envy. So Miller dresses their values up to look more like Roman Republicans. That works, I guess.
Ultimately, it's a comic-book movie with comic-book values, comic-book heroes and comic-book lines. Was it bad for me to look for something more? I guess. In the final analysis this film begs to be parodied on so many levels. I'm eager to see who take the first crack.
