Screened at Harkins • 2nd Viewing
Okay, so maybe this movie’s entire saving grace is its visual splendor and revolutionary achievements of adapting the look of a comic-book into live-action. Whether you like it or not, it’s hard to deny that almost every shot in 300 is excessively badass and divinely grim — minus some of the sunny green screen moments that have held up worse than even a majority of Zack Snyder’s latest *sigh* special effect “pizazz”. As far as I’ve seen though, Snyder and Larry Fong make a pretty good team, and the choreography of the action sequences here are exhilarating; the Mad Max meets Greek mythology character designing is a FAT bonus too. How Snyder explores lore is quite iffy however, relying on some seriously swollen narrated exposition to explain its necessities to the plot in naively speedy amounts of time. The side-plot involving the Queen is also straight-up some DVD-bin quality of writing; I have no clue if there was far more to it in the source material but it seems as if there definitely was. I do enjoy the central story of the 300 Spartans howbeit, and the old-minded postulation of warriors who were built from the ground up to kill and protect their people, allowing themselves to consume even an inevitable defeat as a worthy purpose to their life’s cause.
Case and point, If Zack Snyder had built his entire career off of making ninety-minute battle sequences and called them movies, I wouldn’t complain to be completely honest.
Verdict: B-
“300” is now available to rent on various streaming services.
Burning the Celluloid 
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