Zack Snyder’s incredibly stylized telling of the Battle of Thermopylae gives nearly any other film on this side of the century marker an insurmountable standard to claim the title as the most mythological storytelling display in 21st-century cinema. In a mythic sense (and only in this sense), the Greeks fight for freedom; the Persians stand for slavery, bondage, and an old world; the Spartans, with the all-time everyman Gerard Butler playing the god-like King Leonidas of Sparta, clash their swords against an all-oppressive tyrant hellbent on world domination. The absurd bloodshed reaches a legendary climax only theomachy could pass. To borrow from Shaolin Soccer, one side is “Team Evil” and the underdogs that face them represent the hopes of all crushed by the boot of oppression.
300 is one of those rare Hollywood films with the chutzpah to look different, and regardless of one’s evaluation of the entire film, Snyder’s auteur vision must be at least appreciated. It’s also central to the experience of watching the Greek epic. The early digital look of the film makes excellent use of the unbeholden risk of the new tool in a way that today’s filmmakers often feel blinded to, and Snyder capitalizes on the flexibility and (most importantly) the imaginative potential of the digital camera to bend to his vision for a film rather than to create a film from recycled easily achieved visuals. The desaturated and high-contrast colors, speed-ramping, sublimely chiseled abs and bulging biceps, and operatic scores so essential to the experience of watching a Snyder film emerge out of the pages of Frank Miller’s graphic novels and helps to form the grand ethos of his adaptation of Miller’s source material. As in George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, the lower resolution doesn’t work against the effectiveness of the images. The comic-bookiness has been well noted before and there is no point rehashing it here, but I will say that there is a position in the graphic novel industry called an “inker.” Their job title is aptly named since they ink the images, and it sometimes feels as if Snyder adds such a position to his post-production team because of the essentially binary contrast and the sheer number of silhouetted images. “Shot” and “created” feel like the wrong descriptors for these images; they feel “inked.”
Of course, style never exists in a vacuum. The thematic and political considerations could reasonably temper one’s enjoyment.

Before commencing the final fight of 300, after being betrayed by Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan), the deformed man from Sparta benevolently though surely rejected by Leonidas who leads the Persian army through the secret corridor that erases the Spartan’s tactical advantage, King Leonidas delivers his last edict to the Spartan soldier and the film’s narrator Dilios (David Wenham): “Remember us.” The Spartans fight to their glorious and romantic end telegraphed by history. Dilios reaches their idyllic home (one that in retrospect looks a lot like Veldt in Rebel Moon), tells the story of the 300 Spartans bravely crushed by the army of King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), and repeats the final command of the fallen king: to remember the brave men and their king, and through their memory, to remember the reason they died: for the freedom of Greece.
Snyder’s editor William Hoy (War for the Planet of the Apes, Sucker Punch) uses Wenham’s narrational voice as Dilios tells the story of Leonidas and his bodyguards to weaponize the memory into a fight to determine the teleology of the Greek islands. We see him leading the fight of a united Greek resistance at the Battle of Plataea, again repeating the story of Leonidas as fodder for heroism. The choice to project Thermopylae onto the large (simplistic) narrative of the fight for freedom reveals the mythological intent (which was never well hidden, to be sure). It would be like Miracle ending with Barack Obama’s 2004 DNC keynote. The opera of action only makes sense as something worth rooting for if the viewer is given permission to project nothing but the abstract ideals of freedom and oppression onto the forces of Thermopylae.
And that’s because 300 only works as a mythological clash over freedom and oppression. As soon as political reality interferes, as it will from time to time, Snyder’s movie falls short. The Persians could only be made by someone who has never met a Persian, and the militaristic and honor-valorization of the Spartans comes at the cost of excusing the depicted patriarchal societal deficiencies (by making them necessary to the big battle for freedom). The bodies of the Spartan ubermen create a visual preference over the ugly (or more often, covered) “non-masculine” bodies of their evil enemies. The Spartans’ sculpted abs dazzle so intensely that the light that shines from them might hurt one’s eyes, whereas the Persian King Xerxes carries himself more traditionally effeminately and the deformed (and treacherous) body of Ephialtes contrasts with the perfect shirtless (and heroic) bodies of the 300. The contrast makes it quite easy for the mal-intended viewer to make the wrong connections about masculinity and the necessity of violence. Given Snyder’s own general aversion to political conversations and his appreciation for myth, I think it makes more sense to argue that any failing on his part was not an intentionally vile form of masculinity but rather a failure by using a real conflict with real political descendants as his vessel for myth.
Watching the film that made him a household name for the first time in over a decade, I realized why Snyder finally won me over entirely with the Rebel Moon films: they are arguably the first time where the politique of his films is not a weakness but a strength; the fight actually liberates instead of reinforcing systems of oppression. It’s the best of Zack Snyder without the worst. The fighting here, while from a metanarrative standpoint stands on the side of the ideal of freedom, on another level reinforces narratives of colonialism and violence (and not in the Frantz Fanon manner either). If one can squint hard enough to only see only the etiological myth of some idealized attainment of freedom, 300 is about as good as it gets.
300
2006
dir. Zack Snyder
116 min.
Screens Friday, 6/28, 11:59pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Part of the month-long repertory series: Marvel-less Midnites
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online. He has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, Off Screen, and DMovies amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.