Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey

A scene from 300. (Courtesy photo)

Watching 300 is a strange experience. This puerile fever dream seems to have been willed into being from the ids of a thousand 13-year-old boys. Actually it’s from the grand master of juvenile misanthropy, Frank Miller. Director Zack Snyder has adapted the comic book by Miller and Lynn Varley apparently quite faithfully. It’s about a big, strong white man who decides that violence is the best resolution, and fights super hard against hordes of blacks, gays, Middle Easterners, transvestites, the deformed, and elephants. They play it ramrod straight, spilling a colossal amount of blood in an almost purely cartoonish way. It presents a band of heroes who function a lot like your standard villains, but it doesn’t seem to care if you root for the hero as long as you’re rooting for the spectacle. It’s an energizing piece of technical artistry, but it leaves you feeling quite hollow.

King Leonidas of Sparta (Gerard Butler) has a big problem. Xerxes of Persia (Rodrigo Santoro) is leading a massive slave army into Greece, and the Spartan council doesn’t want to fight them. It doesn’t help that chief council member Theron (Dominic West) is in the pocket of Xerxes—or would be if Xerxes wore anything more than chains and a gold Speedo. It does help that the Spartan queen (Lena Headey) is just as tough as her husband. Here’s a beautiful moment in a marriage: you’re not sure whether to push your enemy’s messenger into a bottomless pit, so you turn to your wife for guidance and she gives you the loving nod. Against the orders of the council, Leonidas leads a hand-picked band of 300 soldiers to halt the Persians at a narrow mountain passage called Thermopylae—more affectionately known as the Hot Gates. There Xerxes throws everything he’s got at Leonidas and his men. But the Persian horde is no match for these burly brawlers. For a few brief moments it looks as though our men might actually hold off the horde, at least long enough for the queen to change the minds of that stubborn council.

It’s an odd feeling to root for the guys who pile up the bodies of their slain enemies, then push them over onto the not-yet-slain. Yet we’re asked to invest so little, it’s not hard to put one’s conscience aside and marvel at the technically dazzling imagery. Many shots are near-identical to panels of Miller’s book, artfully framed to best deliver the exhausted visual cliché. That might be the most astonishing thing of all about 300. It looks so technically novel, and yet outside of a few innovative approaches to decapitation, we’ve seen it all before. And the places where Snyder and his team of screenwriters might have breathed something new into it all—the relationships between the men within the fighting force—they stick to the same old stuff. It’s never a question of who will die; it’s just a matter of how and when.

Butler and Headey have both been flirting with stardom for awhile. With the mind-boggling opening weekend success of 300, they have hit the big time hard. The muscle-bound Butler of 300 is unrecognizable compared to the young man who made his screen debut playing Billy Connelly’s younger brother in Mrs. Brown (1997). Butler since landed major roles in films like Timeline, Dracula 2000, even the title character in Joel Schumacher’s 2004 adaptation of Phantom of the Opera. All were intended to be big hits. Unfortunately they turned out to be stinkers. Butler brings a heap of presence to the role of Leonidas. His Scottish brogue isn’t quite buried under his otherwise indeterminate accent, and what creeps out shows real leading man panache. Headey has brains, beauty, and a nice, sly wounded look. But Headey’s work (The Brothers Grimm, Mrs. Dalloway) comes across as solid if not dynamic.

It would be misguided to suggest Queen Gorgo is actually a strong female character. She’s either on display as an object of desire, or powerful when functioning like a man. David Wenham shows more of the intelligent vulnerability he displayed so affectingly as Faramir in the Lord of the Rings films. He plays Spartan soldier Dilios, who is also the film’s narrator. The rest of the cast seems to have been appointed based on the size of their abdominal muscles.

Zack Snyder directed the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead with disturbingly good conviction. He throws himself into 300 with equal fervor, though without any room for subtlety. Nobody actually engages in conversation; they declaim at each other. They try to say meaningful things about freedom and honor, but it’s all Cliff Notes for a real script. Yet I’d guess Snyder has made exactly the movie he set out to make. I wonder if he or Miller really thought about what kind of messages this film might send. No matter. The 13-year-olds have spoken, and the word of 300 is law.

Alex Manugian lives in Sherman Oaks, California, and works for the Cartoon Network. He grew up in Groton and has reviewed movies for Harvard residents for many years.