300 by Frank Miller & 300: The Movie

Two great tastes that taste great together.

I adore Frank Miller. I adore Lena Headly and Gerard Butler. So naturally, I loved both 300 the book and the movie. To be honest, I had a hard time not cheering throughout the entire movie.

Frank Miller’s 300 is a pleasure to look at with the sepia tones and the splashes of red for emphasis. The characters are not well developed, but the story is a short one, so that didn’t disappoint me. It is a rousing story, one that makes you shout “Huzzah!” or “St. Crispin’s Day!”, whichever you prefer.

300: The Movie brings all that testosterone and vibrancy to the screen. What I liked about 300: just about everything. The actors were great; all good actors without huge names so you could really like them just as they are. Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas, and while he looks a bit young, he is still terribly yummy in the role. You just can’t help but want to follow a guy like that into battle. Lena Headly is a wonderful Queen Gorgo, whose part is greatly enhanced from the graphic novel (Thank God!) She is beautiful and fierce, and terribly devoted to Sparta and her family. (I’ll admit to having a bit of a crush on her for a while, and I can’t wait to see her in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.) The other soldiers were good background, with some of them providing some nice side stories. There were plenty of rousing speeches, but the best parts of the movie were the battle scenes. While I know the slow-motion camera action can get a bit overdone, I can’t help but love every little bit of it in 300.

There wasn’t much I didn’t like in 300. Xerxes and the baddie in Sparta were somewhat caricatures to the point where I almost expected the Sparta baddie to pull up his cape Dudley Do-right/Dastardly style, but the overwhelming spectacle of the movie made me forgive that. Plus, there was no NIN song in the movie, and I just loved it in the trailer.

I really felt the movie translated the graphic novel well, keeping the color palette, the feel, and even pulling exact panels for some shots. And that’s all I really expected out of it. It’s not quite as page to screen as Sin City, but it is pretty close in spots. Some might be turned off of it because of all of the testosterone and the battle rousing, but to me it was just what the graphic novel presented.

Rating: 5 Purrs for sheer Spartan perfection!