Frank Miller is an American artist and writer of comic books and graphic novels such as The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, and the inspiration for today’s blog, 300. I have not previously delved into the genre of the graphic novel, and actually I’m not today either because it’s the 2006 film of the same name by Zack Snyder, inspired by Miller’s story, that I am writing about. Nevertheless, the film is very much led by the graphic novel vibe and owes its stylistic rendering to Miller’s work.
300 is a fictional retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC between the invading Persian army and the Spartans during the Persian Wars. Some years ago, my family and I went on a driving holiday to Greece and along the way visited the sites of three ancient battles: Marathon, Plataea, and the mellifluously named Thermopylae, the “Hot Gates”. There’s a statue of the Spartan king Leonidas there, his fame resonating down the ages a full two and a half thousand years later (2502, at the time of writing, to be precise). The contemporaneous historian Herodotus wrote about Thermopylae in his Histories: how the Persian king Xerxes I and his army were held at the narrow pass at Thermopylae by a massively outnumbered unit of 300 Spartan soldiers. It’s history’s greatest last stand.
And boy, does the film take this idea and run with it! It is of course idealised out of any remote connection to reality, but this is its whole point: it is graphic novel in motion and is made specifically to be a feast for the eyes. It takes something that is the most brutal, pitiless conception imaginable – that of hand-to-hand, kill-or-be-killed combat with cold metal – and turns it into a ballet, a choreography of battle. Gerard Butler plays Leonidas and brings rousing leadership to its apex: the way he motivates his fighters to battle is up there with Braveheart and Henry V.
With a slight word of warning for those for whom mass battle is not their particular cup of tea, do otherwise watch this battle scene. It encapsulates the valour, the do-or-die spirit, the outright strength and discipline and fighting capability of these trained Spartan soldiers, and it does so, as I say, with a stylistically choreographed beauty that is equally wonderful and disturbing to behold. With the proviso that I would never wish myself in the midst of this scene in a million years (the blood runs cold at the thought), by God it’s thrilling to watch!
