If it's blood you've come for, you're welcome to join us

As if to make up for the loss of an hour’s worth of sleep last night, Brooklyn residents today were blessed with a gorgeous, sunny mid 50s afternoon.

Naturally, I spent it inside a dark, windowless movie theater.

The movie of the afternoon? 300, Zach Snyder’s sword-n-sandals comic book adaptation. The movie is basically Gladiator’s brain-damaged, steroidal, coked-up younger sibling--and not in a good way either. Yes, the digitally painted sets and heavily processed photography look fantastic, but that doesn’t save the movie from ending up as little more than a blunt, witless exercise in dumb-as-rocks juvenile wish-fulfillment. This might have been fun, at least, except for the fact that its biggest sin is that it’s boring. Honestly, how could such glorious depravity be so utterly yawn inducing?

300 blends heavy metal weapons with a heavy metal soundtrack. In fact, the movie is probably best understood in the same terms we understand bad heavy metal music: It’s guttural, brutal, monotonous, vulgar, comically self-serious, populated by purposefully outrageous characters in silly costumes, often painful to experience*, and just generally absurd and overwrought.

One problem with the movie is that it’s so concerned with being this grand, brutal, epic that it spends pretty much the whole movie extolling itself as a grand, brutal epic and never actually gets around to being one. In acting, the term “indicating” describes when a performer uses motions and expressions that aren’t realistic, but are intended to explicitly tell the audience what a character is feeling. 300 basically spends its entire running time indicating.

Well, that and showing off the super ripped bods of its Spartan warriors.

As others have noted, the whole thing has a pretty serious homoerotic S&M undertone to it. If you love chiseled beefcake, you’ll have a ball with the legions of CGI-assisted six packs on display here. All of the Spartan warriors run around in lace-up sandals, brown leather underwear and big red capes (a fashion trend that’s apparently already catching on in certain parts of L.A.). There is one chick in the movie, but mostly she’s just there to, um… wait, I have no idea why she was in it. It’s as if the filmmakers were involved in some secret competition to make a movie that was both the most hyper-masculine and the most stereotypically gay thing they could possibly make. In that, they succeeded.

Something else to note: The movie is based on a comic book that’s based on a real historical event. So naturally, 300 is a great history lesson. Some of the things you’ll learn:

• That Greeks liked to yell. And punctuate their speech with big. Dramatic. Pauses. So much in fact that they did it PRETTY MUCH. ALL. THE. TIIIIIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Persians liked body piercing so much that they pretty much stuck piercings everywhere. In their lips, tongues, eyebrows, middle of their cheeks—you ever heard of knee rings? Persians invented em.
• Spartans have a daily quota they have to fulfill on usage of the word "honor," otherwise they’re sentenced to 20 lashes and a self-important speech. (The system is lenient, though: You can substitute a beheading for your daily quota.)
  
• Back in the Greek day, the sky was always brown and gold, which I’m sure is Snyder’s way of saying “Look how our skies appeared before global warming!” If he wanted to reduce emissions, he could’ve started by not making 300.

Still, if you’ve ever wanted to learn what an armored battle-rhinoceros trying to take down some gay porn models in knee-high metal boots and red capes looks like, this is the movie for you.

Addendum: Dave’s list of political allegorical matches to the movie is pretty awesome, made extra awesome by including Dilios as Marty Peretz. One quibble, though: I think Officer McNulty was not France, but Congressional Democrats.

*Admittedly, I actually a lot of kind of awful heavy metal. Like, for instance, The Locust. Just one of those things.