300

Here's something interesting, someone desperately wanted me to see this movie. It was well at the bottom of the queue, but somehow it got sent out before 19 other films which I had placed on higher priority. It was also placed on high priority before, in a hint that I should actually use the high priority list. So, person, I assume that you work at the movie place and have figured out my little project. I hope you're not disappointed!

As I watched this movie, I could think of but one thing. Specifically, this image. In this movie, we see CGI enhanced men running around in their underwear stabbing and kicking men who deign to wear clothes. A big group of totally heterosexual and not at all gay in any way men go out together to kill dudes and be violent in a fountain of repressed homosexuality. I mean, Leonidas has a wife, he can't be, right?

Oh, you say, that's not fair really. Just because they are all impossibly fit and handsome and sweaty, and wear less clothes than are seen in the average porno. That doesn't mean that it's a gay movie really, does it? No, perhaps not, but it's an easy joke to make, and an integral part of the sheer ridiculousness of this film.

The story is simple and a bit dumb. Gerard Butler is Leonidas who is a Spartan king, and impossibly awesome and manly and heterosexual. He is insulted by a Persian messenger and kicks him into a pit of eternal overplayed internet memes. This means he has to go to war with Persia, though he can only take 300 men for silly political reasons. Of course, since Spartans are the most heterosexual men around, that's all they need, and a bunch of killing and silly, comically simplistic characters show up and are easily dispatched.

Certainly, it's pretty, but it's a very artificial pretty, each shot overproduced and wading in the uncanny valley. There's so much slow motion here that one begins to think that time simply goes more slowly in Sparta. The movie is less a film than the cutscenes of a videogame.

See, a lot of critics look on games as something of a lesser art form. I'm looking at YOU, Roger Ebert! This is unfair, at the best of times they can have fantastic stories, good characters, and be art. But just as often, you get games about manly men killing obvious evil in a particularly manly way, and that has gotten the medium something of a poor reputation. This is a film with the weak, killing intensive story of something like God of War, something so violent it becomes comical.

If I want to play such a game, I'll play a freaking game. They can be fun. Sure, I didn't like God of War very much - in fact, I got quite bored of it, for similar reasons as why I got bored of this movie. It's just violence and testosterone, but for no purpose. There's no joy in killing, unless you're killing in a particularly inventive or interesting way. I was never intrigued, never fascinated, and never curious as to what happened next. But at least in GoW, I was an active participant in the action. Here, watching slow motion sweaty men in their underpants, I got bored. Without an investment in the one dimensional characters and their one dimensional nation, I had no real side to root for in the endless battles, and really couldn't care less what happened.

Action is good, but you have to care. The villains and heroes have to have motivations and a personality. While you should have a side to root for, the sides shouldn't be so exaggerated and silly that you can't take them remotely seriously. Turncoat characters should not be obvious from the FIRST FRAME THEY APPEAR IN, villains should have at least a modicum of motivation, rather than they kill because they're evil, heroes should at the very least be slightly identifiable. It'll work in a game because you're participating in the action. But in a movie? Simplistic and exaggerated characters just get dull after a while.