Entertainment
‘The Odyssey’ Officially Meets ‘John Wick’ In This Streaming Action Thriller
While the world waits for Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey to arrive on digital, divisive action auteur Zack Snyder‘s 2006 fantasy epic 300 is currently burning up the charts on Paramount+. Despite decades of imitation and parody, the painterly comic book film remains a stirring watch to this day, especially as a sort of mission statement for the rest of Snyder’s career. And it’s no wonder that home audiences are returning to it.
Snyder’s 300 was a smash hit at the box office, earning some $456 million on a $65 million budget —a success that was no doubt fueled in large part by an iconic, Nine Inch Nails-scored trailer that lit up the burgeoning internet film bro scene, and juiced by the success of Sin City (which was also an adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel) the year before. The film also boasted a genuinely unique (for the time) look, as well as committed performances by Gerard Butler, Michael Fassbender, and Lena Headey. Love or hate its green screen-heavy, speed-ramped vision, it’s a film that will never go away — and it’s certainly a fun piece of counter-programming for The Odyssey.
‘300’ Etched Many New Careers In Marble
Snyder, a music video veteran, exploded on the genre film scene in 2004 with his spectacularly gritty and lively Dawn of the Dead remake, and 300 cemented his status as a low-brow Hollywood auteur — but he brought others along for the ride. Gerard Butler got his show-stopping, bellowing leading-man debut as Leonidas, with several of the bearded, muscle-bound hero’s line readings now part of cinema history. And right alongside him was a young Fassbender, whose screen presence and physique made for an explosive Hollywood debut, playing a spirited young soldier named Stelios.
Pre-300, Butler was mostly known for his turn in the titular role in Joel Schumacher‘s camp masterpiece adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. But this part almost immediately catapulted him to action hero royalty; he was soon facing off against Jamie Foxx in the gory, outlandish F. Gary Gray thriller Law Abiding Citizen, then going on to headline so very many simple, sturdy studio action pictures like Olympus Has Fallen and Plane, to name just a couple. And Snyder’s longtime cinematographer, a fellow music video veteran named Larry Fong, helped sculpt the film’s singular look; he went on to oversee not just the look of Snyder’s next several films, but also blockbusters including Kong: Skull Island and The Tomorrow War.
‘300’ Is Still an Outlandish, Psychedelic Action Spectacle
Snyder’s visual style was never meant to appeal to everyone. Take a look at the Letterboxd ratings for his latest three films, all clearly auteurist projects, on which he served as his own director of photography. In 300, he had a wide, explicitly graphic novel-based canvas on which to paint his elaborate action tableaux — and, despite years of mockery, they’re still astonishing. Blood soars (and sometimes outright pauses) in the air as his airbrushed, roaring ubermenschen clash their shields, spears, and swords. His depiction of the invading Persian army is grotesque in an almost Clive Barker-esque fashion, with body piercings and wanton orgies shown as Satanic omens of societal collapse, which makes the Spartans eventual successful triumph over them all the more cathartic.
But Snyder has never been a fascistic filmmaker. In fact, his career, post-300, has had an explicitly anti-fascist tint to it, and he made it clear that 300 was intended satirically in a contemporaneous interview, when he invoked legendary Robocop director Paul Verhoeven. “If I was (Paul) Verhoeven, and I had made this movie, I probably would have won the fricking festival with it. Because everyone would be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s genius,” Snyder said.
That doesn’t stop the film (like even some of Snyder’s most maligned later releases) from being an outrageous, visceral thrill. Before we expected our superhero films to be shot largely in front of green screens and with flat lighting, to make post-production changes easier, something like 300 was the kind of weirdo blockbuster we’d get from time to time. And if you surrender yourself to it, this is the cackling, blood-soaked, postmodern mythological/historical (heavy quotes around both terms) film that may just satisfy before The Odyssey comes home.
- Release Date
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March 7, 2007
- Runtime
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117 minutes
- Director
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Zack Synder
- Writers
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Kurt Johnstad
- Producers
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Bernie Goldmann, Frank Miller, Gianni Nunnari, Jeffrey Silver, Scott Mednick, William Fay, Ben Waisbren, Craig J. Flores, Deborah Snyder
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