300


So this weekend it was all things Spartan, and in particular the Battle of Thermopylae. Frank Miller, that doyen of graphic novels, wrote a five-parter called 300 some while back, and this morning, before seeing the newly released film, I read it.
It’s a fictionalised telling of King Leonidas leading his 300 Spartan troops into a thankless – hopeless – fight against Xerxes’ Persian Army numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
The comic version is very gritty and down and dirty. The only real backstory that we get is just enough to put the battle into some kind of historical context. There are only a very limited number of characters, and a certain stylised aspect to them. So the Oracle at Delphi is perched precariously at the top of a rock pillar and is just about impossible to reach. While Ephialtes, the Greek who’d betray that Spartans by telling Xerxes the whereabouts of a hidden goat path through the mountain and round the back, is depicted as some kind of monstrous hunchback.
But it’s a thrilling tale that’s told well – I wouldn’t have wanted to wait a month between installments when it was first published.
This has now been turned into a film, 300, which is nearly a straight retelling of Miller’s graphic novel. The sylised feel has obviously followed on directly from the manner in which the same sorts of techniques were used previously for Sin City – another Frank Miller set of graphic novels. Indeed, I did initially think that Robert Rodriguez must have been responsible for the film, so similar is the feel and SFX techniques employed to give an other worldly feel to the film. Indeed, nearly the entire film was shot against either blue or green screen and supplemented by effects.
The film does differ from the book in a few ways – most notably in the addition of a subplot involving Leonidas’ wife Gorgo.
And the film features practically no known stars, vastly reducing the production cost, and meaning that it’s likely to be enormously profitable given its success in the US to date. What this means is that you should expect to see more films such as these in the near future.
It’s a film which is exactly what you expect. Nothing more – nothing less.
Both graphic novel and film are of course inspired by true events, recorded most notably by that original historian Herodotus. These in turn were fictionalised in a 1962 film, The 300 Spartans, which was on BBC2 yesterday. It’s not a film I can remember seeing before, and falls squarely into the typical swords and sandals epic feel. It opens with a panoramic view of the Persian army on the march, which was undoubtedly made without special effects and probably employed thousands of members of the Greek army or similar. Unlike 300, The 300 Spartans takes a much more leisurely approach, with plenty of subplots involving wives and others, while the Spartan life seems much more comfortable. There are also far fewer bare-chested six packs on display in this older film.
Xerxes appears as an almost Ming the Merciless style bad guy, and the battle itself is limited to the end of the film rather than taking up most of it. Not the greatest epic of the period to be honest.
Sadly, I missed Discovery Civilisation channel’s reshowing of The Spartans, Bettany Hughes’ Channel 4 series!


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