Zack Snyder: 300 (2007)

Near the end of Zack Snyder’s 300, after bravely defending the Hot Gates at Thermopylae from Persian hordes, Leonidas (Gerard Butler), King of Sparta, issues one last defiant battle cry and stands firm as hundreds of arrows pierce his flesh. We do not see the arrows hit Leonidas, but instead freeze on the image of him holding firm in the face of death: the figure in silhouette in the foreground and in the background, a sky full of arrows frozen in mid-air before finding their mark. Leonidas dies defending his small nation against the Persian Empire and becomes a mythic figure in the process, uniting the city states of Greece through his death. The presentation of his heroic death is nearly identical to the closing scene of another national mythmaking epic, Zhang Yimou’s wuxia picture Hero (2002), which was released five years before 300. 

At the end of Hero, the King of Qin (Chen Daoming) orders the execution of the hero Nameless (Jet Li) by a shower of arrows in the courtyard of the palace in Xianyang. The lawmakers demand his execution and the King reluctantly understands that sacrificing a great hero is necessary to unite the nation and establish a myth of Chinese nationalism. Nameless accepts his fate as well, understanding that his death is the required payment for a united Chinese nation. The sombre ending, in which Nameless sacrifices himself, only to be taken up as a hero by the men who killed him, shares with Zack Snyder’s digital cinema epic an emotionalist’s approach to myth. Both films show how a heroic death creates an emotional fervour that can unite people behind a single national cause. They also share an understanding that martyrdom is the most powerful way to create a myth. However, while the images and methods of each film mirror each other and serve similar nationalistic purposes, the specific meaning of the image of martyrdom changes drastically depending on the film.

In Hero, the final shot of Nameless is a portrait of calm reserve—Nameless is willing to give himself up for the promise of a new nation, sublimating his identity (he already had no name) and his status as an individual for the sake of the collective. But in 300, the significance is the opposite. Leonidas dies as an individual standing against the imperial collective of Persia, sacrificing himself so that Greeks can live in a world where they remain free people and individual units apart from a Persian imperial whole.

Both films are rousing action epics and narratives about the creation of a heroic national myth, but they argue for opposite ideological outcomes: Hero for collectivism and Chinese Communist nationalism, 300 for a particularly Western philosophical championing of the individual and Greek-style nationalism. The comparison between Hero and 300 is particularly illustrative because it shows how films with opposing ideological approaches can utilize similar narrative and visual tactics and simultaneously succeed as films in their own right. Ultimately, the politics of the viewer shouldn’t prevent one from finding a great deal to appreciate in these diametrically opposed visions of heroism.

It’s important to keep this in mind when discussing 300, because even 14 years after its release, Snyder’s film remains surprisingly divisive. In the immediate wake of its release, the film was hailed for its comic book splash panel visuals and rousing action sequences. But it was also denigrated as hyper-masculine, xenophobic, and even fascistic. The film came out three years after Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead. It was only Snyder’s second film, but the first to capture his distinctive formal style and narrative approach. His subsequent films would only reinforce what many critics perceived as his regressive politics and adolescent approach to storytelling and on-screen violence. But such critical approaches seem incapable of really digging into Snyder’s work due to a pathological need to apply a “cookie cutter” political reading onto all films. 

Thus, when examining a work like 300, it is necessary to clear through the rubble of past discourse and apply a more comprehensive approach to the work. In particular, it is key to view the film primarily as stylized entertainment, with specific formal and thematic interests, and not as an allegorical work of propaganda. A purely ideological reading of the film simply crumbles under the weight of scant and contradictory evidence within the film itself. As well, Snyder seems disinterested in coherent political messaging. In a 2007 interview with Wired, he deflected pinning down contemporary political associations in the film and said, “I don’t live in a cave, but on the other hand, the film’s about a 2,000-year-old conflict. People will say, ‘You made this because we are going to war with Iran.’ I’ll say, ‘We are? Not if I have anything to do with it.’” While there are political and philosophical conventions and even cliches at work in 300, the film is not intended as polemic or political allegory.

By overly focusing on a narrow, political reading of 300, you can forget the simple fact that it is conceived of and shot like a heavy-metal fever dream. It stunningly transposes the detail and horizontal momentum of comic book splash panels to the cinematic frame, all in order to provide a rumination on the mythic power of sacrifice. It abounds with slow motion action sequences, macho one-liners, and graphic depictions of digitally-augmented violence. Viewers who abhor on-screen violence have proven their disdain for 300. But viewers who are more willing to surrender to a filmmaker’s particular vision of the world, especially those adolescent viewers who need genuine spectacle to shake them out of their digitally-created apathy, have a film to cherish in Snyder’s classical action epic.

The film is framed as a story, told by a one-eyed Spartan hoplite, Dilios (David Wenham), to other soldiers gathered around a campfire. The narrative frame is essential to the film’s strategy and effect. For one, it resembles the narration bubbles of a comic book, playing into the film’s generic roots and establishing a familiarity of presentation for the viewer. Second, by explicitly framing the film as a purposely rousing story, it explains and justifies the film’s slips between history and fantasy, injecting grotesque creatures and supernatural heroic feats into a work that ostensibly retells a historical event. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it foregrounds the fact that even within the world of the film the narrative of the 300 Spartans is meant to create a rousing myth about its central heroes for its audience. Finally, the audience in the film and the viewer at home are not one and the same; Dilios is telling his tale to fellow Greeks before the Battle of Plataea, not directly to the viewer. While the viewer of the film is presented with the same information as the soldiers, there is a distance between the intended effect on the one than the other.

The narration ultimately shows that 300 is not a dispassionate retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, but an emotional and even manipulative saga told by one man who wants to win sympathy and adoration for the heroics of Leonidas and his 300 Spartans. In essence, it’s a hype narrative, pumping up its audience and wanting them to buy into its simplified story of heroism so they can kick ass on the battlefield. By extension, it wants to thrill the viewer by getting them to buy into the same.

Of course, in retrospect, being a Zack Snyder film, 300 also continues to explore themes of sacrifice and mythmaking that are central concerns of Snyder as a filmmaker. It expounds upon elements present in Dawn of the Dead and brings them to the foreground, making them central to his second film’s effect. These themes of heroism and martyrdom continue to be essential to Snyder’s work, as is evident in his restoration of the DCEU’s Justice League. 

In 300, Snyder shows how Leonidas needs to sacrifice himself in order to save Sparta from the invading armies of Persia’s King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro). But the sacrifice is not enough to ensure that Leonidas is successful. A legend only becomes a legend when it is told and retold. Thus, Dilios must tell the tale of Leonidas’s feats, first to the Spartan council, and then to the assembled armies of Greece to turn the tale of Leonidas into legend and immortalize his sacrifice. Only then does his sacrifice for the claimed sake of Greek nationalism and Western rationalism fulfill its purpose.

Dilios’s narration is also meant to build up the awesome power and determination of Leonidas and the Spartans. The film’s structural approach is classical in setting up the narrative elements and building anticipation to the rousing battle sequences. For instance, it speaks of Spartan fighting prowess, but takes 45 minutes to actually show them in battle. At the film’s beginning, we see how they expose blemished and deformed children and leave them to die in a pit. We see the grueling childhood training of Spartans in the early sequences of the film, which depict Leonidas’s brutal training as a child. We witness their capacity to withstand pain and fight as a unit. We see them dispatch emissaries and threaten Persian scouts, declaring their own prowess and indomitable will to fight—when a Persian commander threatens that Persia’s “arrows will blot out the sun,” the young Stelios (Michael Fassbender) famously remarks, “Then we will fight in the shade.” But it is not until they engage the Persian army at the Hot Gates that we actually see them in action.

Once that battle comes, Snyder unleashes his full vision for stylized cinematic action, but even from the first frames of 300, his visual style is clear. Building upon the visual approach of Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005), which attempts to recreate comic book panels frame-for-frame, Snyder goes even further is using the tools of digital filmmaking to recreate the colour palette, momentum, composition, and splash panel action of comic books. The film draws on the framing and editing style pioneered by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan and Ridley Scott in Gladiator. Both directors used CGI, altered shutter speeds, and staggered frame rates to represent the warrior’s perceptions (and to manipulate the viewer’s perceptions) of time and space in the midst of battle. But 300 goes even further than those films in stylizing on-screen violence. Although, in Dawn of the Dead, Snyder manipulates time and space to amplify his action scenes, 300 is an order of magnitude beyond that film in liberating action from the physical realm and composing impossible visions on screen.

300 is full of deep shadows, sepia-toned images, and speed-ramped action scenes, where movements speed up or slow down to magnify certain moments on screen. The effect of watching the film is almost like seeing a wall fresco—or yes, a comic book panel—come to life. All the aforementioned elements are key to this effect. The sepia tone places us in the past and creates a totalizing colour palette that makes the reality of the film similar to a painting or a comic drawing. The use of deep shadows creates a two-dimensional depth to the frame, forcing us to pay more attention to horizontal movement than vertical movement in the frame. And the slow motion allows us to pay attention to individual movements and poses within the midst of fast-paced action, similar to how individual panels in a comic emphasize the physical momentum of the characters. It’s an Expressionistic visual approach that uses the freedom and artificiality of digital cinema to truly create a stylized on-screen world, like a culmination of the promise of German Expressionism in the silent era.

Drawing on his love of comic books, Snyder expresses a confidence in the ability of a single frame to tell a full story or convey a full register of emotions. This is evident early in the film when we watch Leonidas as a boy kill a massive wolf. The boy Leonidas thrusts at the left edge of the frame and we only see the spear going through the wolf’s throat in the shadow cast against the rock wall behind Leonidas. It’s not a freeze frame, but it may as well be, as Snyder rests on it for several seconds, understanding that the composition is meticulous enough to convey all the excitement that he needs to. In this respect, Snyder is more classical than many other digital filmmakers—he relies on composition and blocking as much as editing to tell his stories. He used the actual panels of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s source material as storyboards during production. The dedication to each individual frame shows that he is a true stylist and filmmaker with a distinctive mise-en-scène.

Snyder also loves to hold on images of figures in repose. When Leonidas goes to climb the mountain to the Ephors and the Oracle, Snyder holds the camera on a wide shot of Leonidas framed against the massive moon. He also relies on old-fashioned compositions and techniques to tell the story. Immediately after Leonidas visits the Ephors, a Persian ambassador bribes them and laughs at his cunning; as he smiles, his face disappears into shadow until only his eyes are visible, which looks like a frame from a 1930s Universal horror film. Thus, Snyder approaches the film with a savvy blend of digital age manipulation and old-fashioned framing and lighting.

The visual approach reaches its culmination during the action scenes, when Snyder uses all the tools at his disposal to thrill the audience and show off the fighting prowess of the Spartans. During the first battle with the Persians, there’s an extended take of Leonidas fighting from left-to-right across the frame, speeding up or slowing down with each kill, spearing oncoming Persian soldiers, bashing them with his shield, and cutting off limbs. By slowing each strike, we can watch every physical movement of Leonidas and appreciate his skill and strength. The horizontal momentum and lack of cutting recalls the famous hallway fight in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy. The unbroken take also predicts the directorial showmanship of the “one-shot” action scenes that would culminate in Sam Mendes’ 1917, but it’s as much about capturing the momentum of comic book panels as showing off rigorous choreography and camera movements. There’s also an uncomplicated coolness to the approach, borrowed from music video-style, where things simply look better in slow motion. Let’s not forget that Snyder got his start in music videos and commercials before he turned to feature films.

From this moment on, the film is seemingly a never-ending sequence of slow-motion action scenes and stunning wide shots of stylized violence. A few individual frames are among the most stunning frames in comic book cinema: one is of the Spartans driving the Persians off the cliff from right to left, with the falling Persian soldiers forming a kind of wave splashing off the cliff in silhouette. The other is a simple reflection of Leonidas’s spear soaring over Xerxes’ golden throne, which epitomizes the beauty and anticipation of slow-motion momentum on screen.

There’s a danger in writing about 300 to overemphasize the thematic and mythic meaning of the action imagery, as if to suggest that the film is secretly a sophisticated art film and not an action extravaganza. But make no mistake—the film’s primary purpose is to excite with its action scenes and bring out the thrill-seeking adolescent in its viewers. However, there is thematic vision behind the spectacle.

Much of the film is a championing of classical Greco-Roman philosophical concepts: the individual, freedom, reason, and skepticism. Snyder and his co-writers, Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, working from Frank Miller and Lynn Varley’s graphic novel, take advantage of the ancient Greek setting to incorporate concepts thought of as quintessentially Greek. Leonidas is depicted as a man of reason and order over mysticism and superstition. When he goes to the Ephors to consult the Oracle, the Ephors tell him to “Trust the gods,” but he responds that he “prefers to trust reason.” Leonidas is not seen as an intellectual, but his battle plans are thought out and the Spartans have a tactical approach in their fighting that the Persians lack.

The simplest way to emphasize the virtues of Leonidas and the Spartans is to set up a binary with the Persians and constantly show how the Spartans react in response to the weaknesses of their adversaries. This classical approach to archetypes is where accusations of xenophobia and fascism come from. While I disagree with the assertion that because the film is using old fashioned symbolism and storytelling techniques, it necessarily becomes morally-repellent as a result, I admit that there are elements of the text that do not mesh easily with contemporary sensibilities.

The film sets up a series of moral binaries between the Spartans and the Persians. The Spartans are modest, dressing in simple loincloths and capes, while the Persians are ornamented and bejewelled. The Spartans are clearly men, while the Persian army is full of inhuman monsters and grotesqueries, from the masked Immortals to Xerxes’ razor-armed executor. The pleasure tent of Xerxes takes the grotesque approach to almost parodic degrees with the presence of goat men, but even that imagery sets up a Satanic quality to Xerxes that is further emphasized by his language with Leonidas, which resembles Satan’s in his temptation of Jesus in the Gospels, and the literal golden calves that adorn Xerxes’ throne. Leonidas and his Spartans represent a certain vision of masculine perfection, with hulking, scalped muscles that blend both classical notions from sculpture and paintings and more modern notions of masucline beauty drawn from MMA and Navy SEAL adoration.

Conversely, Xerxes confuses conventional notions of masculinity; he is giant and muscular, with a deep voice, but he is ornamented and has feminine mannerisms; when he tries to seduce Leonidas to surrender with promises of wealth and power, there’s an erotic element to his seduction as he places his hands on Leonidas’s shoulders. As Snyder commented to Entertainment Weekly in a March 2007 interview, “What’s more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?” Dominic West’s treacherous Spartan politician, Theron, extends the negative associations of feminine men in 300; when Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) agrees to have sex with him in return for his help with convincing the Council to support Leonidas, he forces her against the wall and turns her around so she faces away from him, suggesting anal sex and a homophobic negative allusion to the connection.

The irony is that 300 is also an ecstatically homoerotic vision, offering up male bodies as objects of lust for the audience. Its presentation of the Spartans as sculpted, hard, waxed objects of masculine beauty draws heavily on certain homosexual aesthetics and idealizes them largely for rejecting any feminine detail. It is not a gay film as we would understand it in modern culture, and even scrubs homosexual aspects from Spartan culture; for instance, it removes institutional pederasty from its vision of Sparta—Leonidas even denigrates Athenians as “boy lovers.” But the homoerotic elements are key to the film’s overwhelming masculine effect.

Snyder is using classical—and many would argue, outdated and regressive—conventions in contrasting between the film’s heroes and villains. Snyder believes in the archetypal power of such associations—he is working in a classical manner in this respect, which is especially obvious in the physical deformities of Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan), the hunchbacked Spartan that wants to fight with Leonidas but betrays him to the Persians when Leonidas refuses his request. Ephialtes resembles characters such as Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest or Richard III in his titular play. The physical deformity becomes an outward signifier of his moral rot, just as Leonidas’ moral standing is exemplified by his physical prowess and appealing aesthetic.

However, as Shakespeare is to Caliban, Snyder is quietly sympathetic to Ephialtes. He acknowledges in the opening scenes that Spartans are inhumanly brutal to the deformed, killing any babies with deformities or blemishes. He even has Leonidas remark in admiration at Ephialtes’ desire to fight and his strong thrust with his spear. But he does not allow that sympathy to warp the historical context where it would be impossible for Ephialtes to fight alongside Leonidas, as such a change would defang the obsessively militaristic and brutal depiction of Spartans in the film. Furthermore, Ephialtes’ decision to betray Leonidas is what makes him one with Xerxes’ monsters; his deformity before is a source of sympathy and only after his betrayal does it become a representation of his moral failings.

There are shortcomings to constructing characters and symbolic meaning this way. For instance, there is a compelling argument that there is no reason to have Ephialtes be a hunchback at all, and that there are other ways to portray his betrayal without associating deformity with moral rot. It’s natural to have such reservations with art and unwise to outright dismiss any viewer’s emotional reactions to a work. Where things grow more thorny though is in how the use of classical symbolism in modern storytelling allows for people to extend the meaning beyond the work and assume that the supposedly-simplified morality of the world of the film extends to the world of the viewer. This is foolish, both for the viewer who thinks the stylized world of 300 represents the moral reality of our own modern world, and for the viewer who thinks that the possibility of somebody making this association means that 300 is a dangerous work that should be banned from public consumption.

As for the film’s supposed commentary on the War on Terror and then-contemporary American politics, 300 resembles the dominant politics of the time as much as any film of the period. Queen Gorgo’s assertion that freedom is paid in blood admittedly sounds like neoconservative speechifying at the time—drawn from comments from the Founding Fathers—but the film is not overly concerned with aligning with one strain of American politics or another. It has contempt for politicians in general and aligns itself with a small nation defending itself against a global empire—as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues, it is more easy to align the current American empire with the Persia of the film than with Sparta.

While I think it is important to address these controversies around the film and acknowledge its use of classical archetypes, which many modern viewers find distasteful, I don’t want to let this discussion of its politics be the last word on the film. So let’s return our attention to the film’s formal approach before closing. Because it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees in terms of focusing on the film’s mythmaking and use of archetypes without acknowledging that these elements are mostly in service of action spectacle.

Zack Snyder has long expressed a desire to make a film based on Heavy Metal, the adult science-fiction and fantasy magazine that is known for its overt sex and violence. The magazine is largely synonymous with heavy metal rock, which is also known for its epic cover art of strong men battling dragons and sexy creatures from hell. There’s a boyish prurience to heavy metal, the magazine and the music, as well as a sincerity and focus on pure emotional responses. Many frames from 300 would belong in the magazine or on the cover of a heavy metal album, whether the sight of Spartans cheering in the ink-black rain as Persian ships crumble between the winds and waves of a storm, or the WWE walk-up music moment of Dilios mentioning that the Spartans started to believe they could win followed by a shot of the Spartans stomping towards the camera ready to kick ass accompanied by roaring metal guitars on Tyler Bates’ musical score.

Late in the film, when the Spartan captain, Artemis (Vincent Regan), sees his son, Astinos (Tom Wisdom), beheaded, he responds in a fury, rampaging through any Persian he can find. In the narration, Dilios says, “He goes wild, blood drunk,” which is about as apt a description as you can get for the film’s intended effect on the viewer. There’s a reason Snyder refers to a 20-year-old boy as the hypothetical ideal viewer of 300 in the quote I mentioned earlier. The film is meant to excite and to whip up viewers into a frenzy at the on-screen action, which builds into a cathartic release with Leonidas’s sacrifice and the eventual Greek triumph implied by the ending scene of the film. It uses all the tools of digital filmmaking and classical archetypal storytelling to make the viewer invested in the story on screen; the emotional investment is the intended end result of the thematic and narrative interests, not merely a jumping off point. While the filmmaking of 300 is sophisticated and frequently brilliant, this is not a film made for endless theorizing and intellectualizing. It’s a thrill ride, first and foremost. There’s a reason it was such a hit during its March release in 2007. It offered something that audiences had never seen on the big screen before.

300 is heavy metal mythmaking. It’s Snyder trying to make you feel like the thumping strings of a raging guitar are coursing through your body and get you to pump your fist in the air and drink in the violent beauty of the imagery on screen. You’ve got two choices when listening to a heavy metal anthem of this sort: turn up the volume and start banging your head or turn the whole thing off. If the music’s for you, it’s an easy choice to make.

9 out of 10

300 (2007, USA)

Directed by Zack Snyder; written by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley; starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West, Vincent Regan, Tom Wisdom, Andrew Pleavin, Andrew Tiernan, Rodrigo Santoro, Stephen McHattie, Michael Fassbender.

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