I am an avowed Frank Miller fan, and I love what he’s done to the comics medium and have the hardbound copy of “The Dark Knight Returns” in my mini library. That said, I’m not too excited at the prospect of hearing the new movie based on his graphic novel, “300”. Why hear, you say, when I’m talking about a movie? Because I know that I will visually be impressed. The few trailers and video journals I’ve seen are so mouthwateringly good that I’ll willingly pay to see this artistic masterpiece on the big screen. But the truth is that Frank Miller’s version of the events at Thermopylae was poorly written and shallow.
Fans of the graphic novel, please refrain from throwing your spears. When I first read 300 I myself was awed by it, by the visual masterpiece of Lynn Varley’s paint over Frank’s rough pencils. I even bought the fact that the spartans only wore briefs and red cloaks to war and that Xerxes the Persian emperor looked like a Nubian. I was one of you once.
But when I read Valerio Massimo Manfredi’s “Spartan” and Steven Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire”, it just dawned on me how lacking Miller’s vision was. How he reduces the Spartans to the role of noble and valiant savages whose only aim in life was to do war. There is hardly any depth to Miller’s Spartans, a trait that will become all too apparent once blown up onto the big screen. I fear that what I’ll end up watching is a beatifully rendered classical Greek action flick, with curly haired men yelling “SPARTAAAAAA!” each time they stab a Persian warrior in the face.
Like Miller’s first film outing “Sin City”, 300 will barrage you with a truckload of blood drenched eye candy. But remember kids, as much as we all like candy, it has no nutritional value.
