Return of the Melodramatic Narrator, or Stoicism in Sandals… If 300 were a cologne commercial – and with all the camera filters and mood lighting and men striking poses it may as well be – its tagline would be Prepare for Glory…wait, that is its tagline.  As the menswear attendant spritzes 300 over your bare chest, you are overcome by its manly scent; now nearly naked, you deliver a roaring speech about honor into the attendent's face, then rip his head from his body and hurl it at a trembling retired couple a few feet away.  Metrosexual faggot!

If you are acquainted with comic book artist Frank Miller's work, you know what to expect:  paranoid, livid machismo, so screamingly belligerent that you don't dare call it gay, although he should really look into that.  In Miller's Sparta, even the women worship "honor" to the nth degree, while children disembowel wolves and beat their playmates senseless.

By the way have you seen how Miller draws women?

Fascinating.  The woman is the one on the right. 

Miller revels in sado-masochistic suffering.  His heroes frequently launch into lengthy internal monologues recounting every spasm of pain and cracking of bone they are made to endure (often by villainous fags).  It's done to a point that makes parody superfluous – in Miller's famous Batman comic, The Dark Knight Returns, the caped crusader is so slap-happy after a series of torturous beatings that he picks a fight with Superman as if no one else will do.  (Indeed the fight is not really required by anything in the story.)

As Miller's need to depict ever more masochistic torments has increased, so has his art style devolved into cartoonishness.  Originally favoring a photo-realistic noirishness (and restrained for some time by fellow artist Klaus Janson's inks), Miller has gravitated toward an expressionistic and grotesque style to match the operatic brutality in his stories.  Even by comic book standards the blocky faces, overdeveloped musculature, flamboyant poses, and extreme facial expressions are taken to wildly unappealing extremes.

To Miller, softness is the great enemy; evil prevails when good men wimp out.  His main complaint about the war with Iraq is that not enough blood has been spilled in the cause of freedom (radical Islam being the ultimate Miller nemesis).  While it's been suggested that 300 makes a statement about the current struggle against terrorism, the reality is that Miller has been banging on about this for years and any similarity with current events is coincidental.

300, both the comic book and movie, is a cartoon version of the famous Battle of Thermopylae.  Miller's version naturally puts the self-sacrificing Spartans at center stage, downplaying the contributions of the other Greek city-states and neglecting to place the battle in its context as a delaying action to hold the Persian advance, in time for the Athenian navy to strike at the Persian navy in the Battle of Salamis, fatally disrupting the Persian army's supply route – and sealing the fate of the Persian invaders.

Instead Miller manufactures a yarn about treachery and political machinations as a backdrop to the battle.  While the Spartan council twiddles its thumbs, King Leonidas heads for Thermopylae under the pretense of wandering the countryside under the protection of 300 bodyguards.  Meanwhile, the perfidious councilman Theron, on the Persian payroll, conspires to keep Sparta from reinforcing Leonidas, and also date rapes Leonidas' wife.  The Persian King Xerxes, who bears more than a passing resemblance to RuPaul, offers Spartan exile Ephialtes a backstage pass to his Girls Gone Wild inner sanctum in return for betraying a route around Leonidas' forces, leading to their encirclement.  Leonidas makes his last stand, Theron is exposed, and the movie ends with a large Greek force preparing to attack a diminished Persian army (presumably at the Battle of Plataea).

Although history (or as much of it as we know) tells a more interesting story of military cunning, it's not Miller's story, which is about chest-thumping male angst and an adolescent conception of honor.  King Leonidas declares more than once the Spartans' refusal to retreat even in the face of certain death.  In reality, refusal to retreat is the mark of military imbecility and any commander of men who made such a declaration would quickly lose the faith of his troops.  But to Miller, inflexibility on the battlefield is a virtue.

Aside from its historical and military illiteracy, the movie is plagued by many other faults.  Foremost among them is an endless, droning narration over the entire movie, which apart from being an intrusion is very badly written.  Second is the stilted dialogue (of which there is far too much), both badly written and badly delivered by actors who seem in a state of constant roid rage (at its most absurd:  when one Persian's arm is cut off, he actually screams, "My arm!" while staring agog at his stump).  Third is the ridiculously exaggerated battle scenes, in which every casual flick of the sword or thrust of the spear causes eruptions of blood and severing of limbs.  Finally, the depiction of soldiers as heedless, slaughtering war machines is so far removed from the reality of war as to be contemptible.

The archness throughout destroys any sense of pacing, rendering many scenes dull through simple weariness.  The static visuals labor without any dynamism or storytelling finesse.  At one point director Zack Snyder pairs slo-mo shots of Spartans marching toward the camera with heavy metal guitar squeals, as if he is directing the world's longest Metallica video.

If Miller and Snyder were trying for a depiction of masculine virtue, they failed utterly, producing something closer to camp than heroism, and betraying a callow unfamiliarity with real sacrifice.

Update:  Someone compared the above review to this article by the War Nerd.  I would like to distance myself here from that shit-flinging fool by pointing out that the War Nerd's own criticism of the movie is filled with errors.  The point that parts of the movie are ahistorical should be obvious even to a general audience (I think I learned about the Battle of Thermopylae in the fourth grade), so discovering two different people who both recognize the inaccuracies is not very remarkable.  I doubt that Snyder or even Miller are unaware that they are stretching the truth in places.

Also, the War Nerd's article predictably degenerates into more shit-flinging about those evil neocons.  To anyone with a brain this is another clue that the War Nerd is a lazy cretin too fucking dumb to bash this very stupid movie properly.  I suppose it must be said for his imbecile fans that the neocons have utterly no connection to 300, which is in fact based on a comic book written years ago.  The War Nerd calls the creators (and presumably the audiences that made it a success) "fascists", which is the sort of mindless invective that typifies his entire output and his seriously damaged brain.  There is much else that is inane in this fuckwit's short but very, very idiotic article.  It is really an accomplishment of sorts.