Thursday

I can only admit to being disappointed with 300. On what was perhaps the sunniest day of the year I queued up to pay money to sit in the dark for two hours. I don't regret it, but I am disappointed. As you would expect, the look and the sound of the film was at times mind-blowing - especially at the start - but as soon as the actors started speaking things went wrong. The script was terrible - I don't know how close it is to Miller's - and the actors, perhaps innocent of that fault, performed it horribly. Vincent Regan is good enough, but Gerard Butler and Lena Headey, I thought, were both terrible. I suppose they weren't helped by the plot, and the vague abstractions they were supposed to uphold but, given the pool of talent in Hollywood, surely something better could have been done? This film also seemed to suffer from post-Gladiator syndrome. That is: soundtrack of a woman's voice singing indistinguishable, mournful sounds over scenes of cornfields at sunset. Why do so many films about the ancient world have this? In Gladiator it was just about excusable, but hasn't been since then. At the moment of his death, just as in Ridley Scott's film, Leonidas thinks of his wife and gets an extra spurt of energy. One last complaint, despite the great amount of half-naked bodies I think this movie does not have enough physicality. Granted that the nature of the enterprise was to be artificial and glossy, but I still think it could have been more physical. Overall, quite viscerally entertaining in parts, but not much more to recommend it after that.