Movie Review #29 - 300
Apr. 19th, 2007 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catalyst2Having heard so much about this movie and loved the trailers, I just had to see this. Did I like it? Too damn right - this was a beautiful and powerful film.
First check of the watch - never, just too captured by the pretties!
To say that this film was visually stunning would be an understatement - each individual frame looked like a work of art, laboured upon for months with loving care (and judging by the length of the visual credits, I suspect that each frame also had a team of 10 people working on it for all those months too!) but it produced the most gorgeously coloured and composed movie I have ever seen.
Did it stick closely to Millar's original graphic novel? Extracting out the Queen Gorgo sub-plot, this followed Millar's book very closely - some of the shots were, I suspect, exact copies of frames from the original. The plot was fairly empty - but then this is the story of a single battle fought over the space of three day but how much character development do you go through in three days?
What was bad? Not too much really - historically, it's not particularly accurate but when I realise that the tale is being told essentially as a Spartan morale booster (more on that scene later), I realised that it was making no attempt to be historically accurate because this was from the Spartan perspective only and wasn't in any sense intended to be historically accurate.
Back to the "morale booster" scene - that was the only scene that I think could have been cut in its entirety. There was simply no need to show Dilios at the battle of Plataea - in fact, showing him as an old man telling this as a campfire tale to Spartan boys training to be warriors would have been a better close - not to mention that the speech was crap. being too long, too boring and not needed at all.
Overall, a magnificent movie which was very pretty to watch and full of action scenes that just took my breath away (the first time the Spartans crouch in formation at the pass just sent tingles up and down my spine).
First check of the watch - never, just too captured by the pretties!
To say that this film was visually stunning would be an understatement - each individual frame looked like a work of art, laboured upon for months with loving care (and judging by the length of the visual credits, I suspect that each frame also had a team of 10 people working on it for all those months too!) but it produced the most gorgeously coloured and composed movie I have ever seen.
Did it stick closely to Millar's original graphic novel? Extracting out the Queen Gorgo sub-plot, this followed Millar's book very closely - some of the shots were, I suspect, exact copies of frames from the original. The plot was fairly empty - but then this is the story of a single battle fought over the space of three day but how much character development do you go through in three days?
What was bad? Not too much really - historically, it's not particularly accurate but when I realise that the tale is being told essentially as a Spartan morale booster (more on that scene later), I realised that it was making no attempt to be historically accurate because this was from the Spartan perspective only and wasn't in any sense intended to be historically accurate.
Back to the "morale booster" scene - that was the only scene that I think could have been cut in its entirety. There was simply no need to show Dilios at the battle of Plataea - in fact, showing him as an old man telling this as a campfire tale to Spartan boys training to be warriors would have been a better close - not to mention that the speech was crap. being too long, too boring and not needed at all.
Overall, a magnificent movie which was very pretty to watch and full of action scenes that just took my breath away (the first time the Spartans crouch in formation at the pass just sent tingles up and down my spine).
