300 (2006)
Directed by Zack Snyder
Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham

300 is set in 476 BC and is about the war between the Spartans of Ancient Greece and the Persian warriors. Gerard Butler is Leonidas, the leader of 300 Spartans and the movie follows their journey to defeat the Persian god-king Xerxes.

This Spartan King has a Scottish accent, which should pretty much tell you what you need to know about this movie. Every one of the characters is very one-dimensional, and the portrayal of the ancient Persians seems somewhat racist. The dialogue doesn't try to be realistic, it just tries to make cool-sounding movie quotes.The story is predictable, the plot and characterisation are shafted in favour of action, visuals and violence.

Speaking of the visuals, this is what Zack Snyder does best – comic book adaptations that look like they leapt from the page to the screen. And the movie is great at that with its shot composition, but the colours really don’t translate well to a movie. It looks terribly washed out and boring, with dark greys and browns. A movie doesn’t have to be bright-coloured to be good looking, Zack Snyder has proved that with Watchmen and Batman V Superman, but the dark colours just don’t work well here.

The action is exciting at first, but by the end it’s tiring and excessive. It all just looks really fake, even shots where Leonidas is just standing in a field. I think Zack Snyder has become a better director in his movies after this one, but he really went over the top with his style here. Every action scene uses the cliché slow-motion/speed-up technique, and again, it gets boring by the end. If you condensed every slow motion scene in this movie to normal speed, it would probably have a runtime of 90 minutes.

300 is like Transformers in Ancient Greece, it’s overblown, excessive, and just really dumb, with boring subplots and characters.

2/5 stars