Midweek Mention... 300

Based on a 1998 Frank Miller comic book which in turn was inspired by the 1962 Rudolph Maté sword and sandals epic THE 300 SPARTANS, 300 (2006) is Zack Snyder's very loose retelling of the events of the Battle of Thermopylae taking place circa 480 BC and I don't really think I can reasonably cram 1 more number into this sentence before it loses any semblance of aardvark.
  
Gerard Butler plays Leonidas, master chocolatier and King of the Spartans, the most feared and formidable of all forces in ancient Greece. Warned by a messenger that the God King Xerxes plans to invade their country and despite most males being raised from a young age to be brutal unthinking warriors obsessed with achieving an honourable death in battle, Leonidas is unable to convince the Spartan political hierarchy of the dangers that the Persians represent and so, leaving Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) in charge to persuade the Spartan Council of the imminent threat, he gathers 300 of his best men armed only with chiselled abs and ferocious amounts of guyliner to fight the invading empire in a suicide mission at The Hot Gates, where the narrow cliffs and raging seas prevent the Greeks from being overwhelmed by the enemies superior numbers.
 
Utterly po-faced and sincere despite the often ridiculous subject matter, the film has a distinct aesthetic brought to the screen straight from the graphic novel itself; colour desaturation, heavy use of CGI backgrounds and Zack Snyder’s signature speed-ramping technique all combined to visceral effect in the many scenes of fighting, dismemberment and bloodletting against an ever escalating and inventive adversary. Of course you might think that this is all incredibly silly, boneheaded testosterone-fuelled fantasy nonsense with a cliched script and terrible acting, you might find yourself adverse to the troubling ableist aspects to Miller's narrative or just be plain confused as to how a movie can be both incredibly homoerotic and incredibly homophobic at the same time and I wouldn't particularly argue with you but I got a kick out of this when I saw it at the cinema and probably enjoyed it more when I watched it for this review. A triumph of style over substance then but not an opinion completely shared by all of us.

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