300

Hotel Artemis writer/director Drew Pearce braves Zack Snyder’s abs-tastic action epic for the first time. This! Is! Madness!

LISTEN, I TRIED not to start this with the traditional mea culpa that comes with the First Take Club. But it’s so difficult. Because frankly, I don’t know what I was doing in 2007 that meant I didn’t see 300 in cinemas. And I sure as shit don’t know why I haven’t caught it in the 11 years since.

Digging deeper, though, there are a few possibilities. Around the time of release, I was shooting the pilot for No Heroics, so I may not have felt like going to watch a giant international success story while that was happening. There’s the chance that my relationship with the increasingly problematic politics of Frank Miller affected my no-show, too. I also think there’s a certain point with era-defining movies where it starts to feel redundant to catch up — all those hot takes and parodies make you feel like you’ve seen them already.

And maybe I thought it looked a bit like a giant Smashing Pumpkins video. I still do. But it turns out that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth watching…

Because for starters — excuse the obvious — Zack Snyder did an extremely good job. The aesthetic might not be to my taste, but the execution and focus involved in landing something this stylistically precise is really tough. There’s some beautiful, striking imagery — the rain on Leonidas’ shield, or his final death by a tsunami of arrows. And unlike Sin City, it’s not just a visual facsimile of the comic. Though it homages some of Miller and Lynn Varley’s classic frames — especially the wide profile shots of the cliff’s-edge fight scenes — this is the Year Zero of Snyder’s über-style. There’s a brave structure here too — no real act breaks, just 45 minutes of set-up, then an hour-anda-half of action. In the studio system, that’s positively avant-garde. And the movie gets pleasingly gorier as it goes along — a trick I used in Hotel Artemis — as if the rising tide of screaming elephants and severed arms and dead rhinos and blood and gristle are an escalating narrative device all of their own.

It’s also a fascinating product of its time, and a precursor of many things to come. First, and most excitingly, it’s a David Leitch and Chad Stahelski joint. They’re better known now as directors (John Wick, Deadpool 2), but at the time were both stuntmen and co-ordinators. After 300, they’d go on to form action design company 87Eleven, who revolutionised the last ten years of American fight sequences like those in Captain America: Winter

Soldier. They pioneered ‘fight-viz’ (video-storyboarding every shot) and brought a military precision and real-world martial arts to the game.

There’s also a ton of VFX work that was groundbreaking for the time but that now we see everywhere — I wouldn’t be surprised if the software for half of it originated in the creation of 300. Digital ash, a surfeit of CG bird flocks, speed-ramping to disguise the slowness of an actor’s punch or emphasise a kill, digital crash-zooms and even 2D main-on-end credits. The grade is so heavy, and the black tones so crushed, that you can see every wrinkle and pore on the actors’ faces — which is an odd and off-putting contrast to the shininess of the CGI, a weird mix of hyper-reality and macro-reality. It also has a score featuring the first of a billion rip-offs of Limp Bizkit’s Mission: Impossible theme cover from M:I-2. In my role as an ‘edit doctor’, that song gets temp-ed into half of the rough cuts of movies I see, and that’s why there have been so many watered-down versions of it in action cinema for the last ten years.

Of course, there’s also the bejewelled combat elephant in the room: the movie’s politics. I don’t believe we need to retroactively view older movies through the lens of present-day standards… but… 300 is only 11 years old. And on occasion I found it fairly uncomfortable watching our heroes — a bunch of white British movie stars with dodgy semi-ethnic fake tans — violently take down an army virtually defined by its ‘otherness’. These Spartans don’t exactly read as the underdogs onscreen… but I suppose that’s another marker of its time — and perhaps the mindset of Miller’s source material too.

Ultimately, though, 300 stands up as a modern action standard, and a genuinely auteurist piece of work. Plus its legacy is deep — the dire-wolves, oracles, boob-shots and Lena Headey’s presence surely influenced the creation of a certain modern fantasy behemoth, for example. And honestly — if you can’t enjoy Gerard Butler, guyliner streaming and digital sweat gleaming on his abs, as he bellows a Connery-esque line-read of, “Tonight we dine in hell!”… then your idea of a good night out and mine are clearly very different.

300 IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD. HOTEL ARTEMIS IS OUT ON 12 NOVEMBER ON DOWNLOAD, AND ON 26 NOVEMBER ON DVD AND BLU-RAY