The Art of War
Something very real did happen 25 centuries ago in a narrow pass on Greece's northern coast called Thermopylae--the name means „the hot gates.“ In August of 480 B.C., a force of about 7,000 Greek soldiers assembled there, including 300 Spartans under the leadership of their king, Leonidas. The Spartans were sick, scary fighters, brutally trained from childhood, the ancient equivalent of special forces. They were there to meet an army of more than 250,000 Persians under the command of King Xerxes.
The odds were ludicrously bad, the outcome a foregone conclusion. Most of the Greeks retreated, but the 300 Spartans, the hard core of the Greek army, chose to fight on, using the natural strategic advantage of the pass. They lasted three days-beyond all hope, beyond what should have been militarily possible-and then they died. Their refusal to surrender their freedom to the Persians inspired the rest of the Greeks, who ultimately rose up as a nation and beat back the invaders.
That was then. On March 9, a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae, called 300, will hit theaters. It was made by a young director, stars nobody in particular, and it looks like nothing you've ever seen. Very little in 300 is real except the actors. Sets, locations, armies, blood--they're all computer generated. It's beautiful, and it might well be the future of filmmaking. But should it be?
In 1962 a boy named Frank Miller went to the movies with his parents. The movie was Rudolph Maté‚s The 300 Spartans. Miller was 5. „It had a deep, deep effect on me,“ Miller says. „I actually snuck across the theater in order to confer with my dad and make sure the heroes really were dying. I stopped thinking of heroes as being the people who got medals at the end or the key to the city and started thinking of them more as the people who did the right thing and damn the consequences.“ When Miller grew up, he created a comic book about the Battle of Thermopylae called simply 300. Miller‘s account of the battle-now doubly refracted through two media-was read by a movie director named Zack Snyder.
Snyder, 40, cut his teeth on high-concept, effects-heavy TV commercials. He made his feature debut in 2004 with a feather-light, razor-sharp remake of the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. (Rent it just for the opening credits, where zombies rip various cities to pieces as Johnny Cash sings When the Man Comes Around.) Snyder is something of a dork. Only a dork-the finest, most discriminating of dorks-would have read 300 in the first place. When Maté made The 300 Spartans, he packed up his cameras and his actors and his caterers and went to Greece. When Snyder made 300, he did what dorks do: he locked himself in a room with a bunch of fancy computers.
Full article on TIME magazine
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