That brings us to 300: Rise of an Empire, which is an altogether more coherent and less politically convoluted film than 300. It was kind of ridiculous, but Russian audiences apparently ate it up.) (Recently, the new Russian movie Stalingrad tried to do for WWII what 300 did for the ancient world. It worked so well that everybody and his mother has been aping it ever since. Snyder invested this rarefied stylistic conceit with a visceral kick: You admired the movement and cringed at the violence, even as you held the movie itself at arm’s length for its stupidity. Its speed-ramping lateral tracking shots resembled gory, 21st-century variations on Eadweard Muybridge’s studies in motion.
For all its hormonally unbalanced political ideas, 300 had a visual purity. You sensed that, like a Chinese tattoo whose translation remains unknown, this stuff didn’t really mean anything to him: It just looked cool.Īnd bro, it did look cool. Don’t ask me how we managed to see ourselves in the outnumbered, outgunned resistance and our scattered and desperate enemy in the massive, well-armed invading horde it was a dark time for everybody.ĭid Snyder have any real idea of the loaded politics of his filmmaking, the hateful equation at the heart of 300? I’m not sure: He followed 300 up with a literal-minded adaptation of Alan Moore’s subversive comic book Watchmen. Sword and sandal movies weren’t exactly big business, but 300 captured something in the culture: The Iraq War was raging, and the film portrayed the beefy, noble Spartan warriors as brave Western heroes holding off a decadent, grotesque, beyond-Orientalized Persian army. Back in 2006, Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s comic book 300, a macho reimagining of the battle between a small band of Spartans and the Persian army in Thermopylae, made for a most unlikely hit. And the worst thing about it is that Zack Snyder didn’t direct it.Īllow me to explain myself.
The best thing about the new 300: Rise of an Empire is that Zack Snyder didn’t direct it.
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