September 5, 2007

  • 300

    I just finished watching 300 on dvd.  All I said as the credits rolled, was "wooooowwwww...."

    It was like they merged and blended Gladiator with Hero (Ying Xiong), and came up with something totally different and striking in its own (and in some ways better than both), thanks to the directing of Zach Snyder, the screenwriters, and the ever vivid bountiful mind of creator and graphic novelist Frank Miller.

    Every moment of the film, the visuals were a spectacle of awe and a ballet of movement and chaos.  Stunning.  Stirring.  Powerful.  Its set-up as the embellished tale told by Dilios moves the story on as does an expert storyteller, never letting up, and culminating in a wonderfully dramatic and rousing finish.  The acting on all parts was just as the set-up, powerfully over-the-top to match the surrealism of the visuals, in every way aiding in striking the viewer down and battering the viewer into a coma with a barrage of visual and oratory force.  I hated Gerard Butler the last time I saw him, in that awful rendition of The Phantom of the Opera, but here he fills his shoes - or shall we say sandals - perfectly.  I was especially impressed David Wenham as the storyteller Dilios (whom I unfortunately kept confusing with Sean Bean thanks to their former stints together in the Lord of the Rings); the rhetorical performance he gave would be at home in any future remake of Julius Caesar.  I also thought Lena Headey gave a strong performance as Queen Gorgo right up until the scene where she addresses the council of Sparta - the beginning of her speech seemed to be lacking somewhat of the oratory power with which David Wenham here excelled.  I felt that especially as the Queen of Sparta, the beginning of her monologue was a little too vulnerable and soft, not powerful enough, and could have used some help from a Toastmasters public speaking course.

    The musical score by Tyler Bates was, as the visuals and the acting, a perfectly suited to the film, invoking with guitar riffs and repetitive rhythms the menace, power, and brutality that was paralleled in the nonstop on-screen action.  I could go on to scream the praise of the digital effects, the costuming, the makeup effects, and all, but it would be more of the same.  A continuous orgy of surreal action and art.

    Although this film is in no way Chinese, I believe that every student of wushu should watch it; it is as if they distilled with visual effects, camera speed, choreography, and digital prowess all that is speed and force and rhythm and flow and power and action that is in the best of wushu.  The best of wushu forms should look and feel like that one visual sequence where Leonidas lays a continuous forward solo path of destruction through the oncoming Persian army.  That one sequence is the most amazing continuous scene in the entire film, in my humble opinion.

    Now all that praise said, it is interesting also to ponder the interesting moral dichotomy between the philosophical approaches of both Hero and of 300 to similar historical situations.  In both films, we have a small group of heroes that overwhelm the odds to challenge a conquering tyrant.  However, the latter exalts the virtues of steadfastness, of defiance, of conviction to freedom, a choice far more deontological in nature than its silver-screen compatriot.  It rejects the reason of odds and affirms that the best consequence must fundamentally include the satisfaction of principle.  The former eschews all of this for what it sees as the conviction to decide in favour of reason and its own view of the greater good over defiance, revenge, or even freedom.  The conviction it deifies is the capacity to choose consequentially over all other principles; the hero chooses what he sees as the greater good of stability of unity over continuation of conflict. 

    Of course, one could also make this out to also be a difference in first principles rather than a divide between deontological and consequentialist approaches.  As it is late, and I grow weary, I shall leave my fair reader to entertain his or her own thoughts on this matter.

    4.5 lightning bolts out of 5.