BERLIN- Probably Zack Snyder has not read Herodius of Halicarnaso, but he knew how to capture the epic of that battle of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartans under command of King Leonidas held back thousands of Persians led by Xerxes. In reality, Snyder does not partake of Herodius, rather of Frank Miller, author of the comic novel, which is in fact based essentially on Greek history. The film, “300,” was presented yesterday in the official section of the Festival of Berlin and is a magnificent visual spectacle and argumentatively, although its position goes against the pacifist attitude of our day, such that people felt attacked in the third place which hurts the most: their convictions. (The first is their pocket book and second, just to the side of their pocket book.)
Snyder “paints” his film in the style of Miller, and tells the story in large format with large strokes: the background voice perhaps appears offensive to some, but is tremendously direct, calculated, and metaphoric. “Return with your shield or on it,” that is the motto of the characters of this film, which is an elegy, without softening or analgesics, of war; of war to protect liberty and peace. Frankly, although they are clear and clean, they are not things that are convenient to say out loud in current times, anything which runs against the Persians.
Spartans dead from laughing.
Surely if today a Spartan rose from the dead, he would die (again) from laughter upon seeing the esthetics and seasoning that his people brought out in “300,” all in the form of aroused “hammers,” in effect, the love parade, although much more discrete still than the Persians, especially their chief, Xerxes, a libertine two meters tall decked out like the queen of the Carnival of Rio…But the accessaries, or be it, the suits and equipment, do not distract us from the essential: three hundred guys grit their teeth, don’t back down before terror, and achieve (before dying, of course) recognition of their heroic feat by the Greeks and thus maintained their culture and civilization. For a certain century. As one can see, it is easy to model this epic to any time and place, east or west, ours or theirs… Pure dynamite, if you will allow me to say.
Visually and cinematographically it is, in every respect, where “300” wins the great battle: there are scenes never viewed and the inevitable mixture of reality and virtual reality cause an almost annoying blinking. At best, Zack Snyder, who will not have read Herodius and who won over the modern world with his previous film, “Dawn of the Dead”, and who has promised to touch even the untouchable, the “Watchman” of Alan Moore, passes to the same page in the black book where Mel Gibson is.
~thank you to double scotch for this translation