un|we|sen

The following review was originally published on a blog I no longer maintain.

I saw 300 yesterday, and just have to warn people away from it.

It’s not that the movie is badly produced. It looks nice, in most cases. High-quality digital photography have the downside that piercings on Xerces’s face show plainly that they’re stuck on, but it still looks nice. But it’s got nothing to show, unless you are entertained by muscular men standing around holding pointless and repetitive monologues¹.

The major problem with the movie is that it’s a disappointment in just about every respect. I mean, if you know Frank Miller, you know that the story will be a more or less thin vehicle for showing copious amounts of blood. What depth there is is usually restricted to exposing the more base emotions of man: lust, hate… and some more hate. Miller’s stories are often close to caricatures – reducing characters and their interactions to one essential component, and grotesquely blowing that out of proportion. That gives you the manically brutal Batman in “Return of the Dark Knight”, who can’t really distinguish the baddies from the goodies anymore – anyone who’s not with him is against him. That gives you Sin City.

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1. And you don’t mind the fact that those muscles look a bit too airbrushed to be real. [↩]