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I must admit after seeing how fantasy, effects, and history could be blended into a rich experience in Pan's Labyrinth, I had high hopes for 300 going into it.
On the positive side, like many others, I thought the Maxfield-Parrish-like cinematography throughout the film was intriguing. That being said, the haunting potential of the effect was unfortunately tortured by an inept dialogue and historical gloss which one might expect a video game geek to ejaculate, and splashed on the screen with all the inspiration and nuance of a hack comic book. The battlefield cliches spouted as gratuitously as the blood, and after the first 5 minutes of battle, with equal lack of meaning. This film seeks to emmulate the look and sound of a video game, and as a result, any potential for depth or intelligence is buried under a compulsive, repetitive drone of the obvious and an unbearable simple-minded parade of the cliched symbols of good vs. evil.
I seem to recall even the cinematographic effect was employed more effectively, although more briefly, in the near-death scenes in Gladiator. And I thought Gladiator was a bit over-the-top with the obvious melodrama. But then came Alexander and I relized how much further low could go. I stand corrected. 300 clearly now has overtaken its predecessors for self-evident and unnecessary narration heaped over an already over-simplified historical cartoon. It seems as time and visual grace progress, sword and sandal flicks regress with a narrative and conceptual ineptness that makes, by comparison, even TV series like Rome seem like Masterpiece Theater.
What I don't understand is, if you make a film look and sound like a video game, then by definition it is going to be worse than a video game since there is no interactive gameplay, unless you consider getting up to get popcorn gameplay. Of course, *smacks head*, this film is undoubtedly just an advertisement for a video game, a commercial for which the film-makers just got you to pay $8.
Now that is brilliant.
On the positive side, like many others, I thought the Maxfield-Parrish-like cinematography throughout the film was intriguing. That being said, the haunting potential of the effect was unfortunately tortured by an inept dialogue and historical gloss which one might expect a video game geek to ejaculate, and splashed on the screen with all the inspiration and nuance of a hack comic book. The battlefield cliches spouted as gratuitously as the blood, and after the first 5 minutes of battle, with equal lack of meaning. This film seeks to emmulate the look and sound of a video game, and as a result, any potential for depth or intelligence is buried under a compulsive, repetitive drone of the obvious and an unbearable simple-minded parade of the cliched symbols of good vs. evil.
I seem to recall even the cinematographic effect was employed more effectively, although more briefly, in the near-death scenes in Gladiator. And I thought Gladiator was a bit over-the-top with the obvious melodrama. But then came Alexander and I relized how much further low could go. I stand corrected. 300 clearly now has overtaken its predecessors for self-evident and unnecessary narration heaped over an already over-simplified historical cartoon. It seems as time and visual grace progress, sword and sandal flicks regress with a narrative and conceptual ineptness that makes, by comparison, even TV series like Rome seem like Masterpiece Theater.
What I don't understand is, if you make a film look and sound like a video game, then by definition it is going to be worse than a video game since there is no interactive gameplay, unless you consider getting up to get popcorn gameplay. Of course, *smacks head*, this film is undoubtedly just an advertisement for a video game, a commercial for which the film-makers just got you to pay $8.
Now that is brilliant.
Last edited by 2edges; 06-16-07 at 12:11 AM.
Reason: just stripping off a few adjectives
