Three words: overblown, heavy-handed.
Well, let me start off by saying that I did not hate it. In order to hate it, I would have to really take it as a serious piece of movie-making, and I don't.
I started writing another review earlier, but I have since become unsatisfied with it because a few things have changed. But not many. Before, I had the above two sentences written, and I didn't delete them because I still think they apply.
When I started writing the review, I hadn't even seen the comic, and I had dismissed a lot of what was wrong and awkward about the movie as poor decision making and bad directing. I realize now that it was the unsuccessful attempt to perfectly recreate the comic book, down to particular details and shots and dialogue. Sometimes when a film tries to duplicate something as exactly as possible, the translation doesn't work, and you end up with something awkward and overly pedantic. And yet, when the film strayed from a direct adaptation and put in some original characters/dialogue/story line, in attempting to keep consistent with the feel of the book, executed it poorly.
What is good about the movie is what most people come to see, the action and the fighting. It is, at its core, an action movie, and if you put in enough gore and clashing, clanking swords and armor, it's enough to get anyone's adrenaline pumping. The Spartans are a warrior community, and this is a battle for honor and glory (as they never cease to remind us), and for keeping all Greeks free citizens. Preventing the spread of slavery and godless decadence as personified by a gilded Xerxes, resplendent in gold head necklaces (headlaces?), eye makeup, and gold codpiece. Xerxes himself is one of the most exciting parts of the film; we await his appearance, and wonder how exactly this guy is going to match up to all the hype, first of all from what everyone says about him, and also because he actually existed.
There is blood and there is gore and there are beheadings and other loss of limbs and impalements and death to various large animals just so you really know that these guys are a bunch of bad mofos. The battle scenes are pretty formulaic, though, in that the filmmakers employ overused tricks to make them seem really exciting. For instance, the armies are advancing with a grinding background of heavy metal music, battles are choreographed using extreme slow motion, then sped up, then slow again so you can see these fantastically muscled men thrust their spears through the big, bad Persians subtle movement by subtle movement. If you really want to see original and novel battle scenes, I don't recommend this, but rather something like Lord of the Rings, which this film quite obviously wishes it was.
What is worst about this film is the dialogue. And this might seem to be a moot point because the general movie-going public doesn't need dialogue, they need flash and awe and increasingly menacing foes. But unfortunately, it is not all battles; there is some plot and some pontificating on the part of a surprisingly terrible narrator, in addition to a whole story arc back home in Sparta in which King Leonidas's intrepid queen takes on the Senate and The Law and tries to save her husband's honor and glory and Sparta and freedom. There are some political debates between the queen and some old men about whether or not to send in reinforcements, and some of the rhetoric espoused by these characters is reminiscent of our current administration, arguing in favor of deploying troops in order to preserve these values that we hold dear: freedom and democracy.
As for the visuals, it's not all spectacle and slashing. The makeup and special effects are uncommonly bad. Had Weta Workshop taken on this project, surely the beasts and bruises wouldn't look as ridiculous as they do. I would imagine that in this day and age, the goal of computer-generated visual effects was to maximize realism and have us wonder if there really could be such things as monsters. But clearly all of the work went into making decapitations look as good as possible because the scars that many of the characters wear look like putty, and the CG animals look like they are years behind the times. Had the animators only decided to work on a few things to make them look perfect, they might have succeeded, but this film is packed with characters and creatures that are only on screen for a few seconds, and unfortunately look BAD.
The sexuality in the movie is obviously put in to attract and excite the hordes of male fans. It's pointless and excessive, and when trying to be seductive, it falls flat as being horrifically cheesy. The casting call for the female lead who plays the queen must have been, "somewhat over 30, great tits." Because that is all she really has to lend the film. Additionally, in a scene where Xerxes is trying to recruit an castoff Spartan to his side, he has a slew of naked dancing girls performing all sorts of anachronistically tasteless sexual acts upon each other and the Spartan. Instead of looking sexy, it looks strange and misplaced.
This film is excessive by all counts. It attempts to replicate a comic book directly, add some historical depth, and play up the mythology part without being able to fully commit to one of those three genres. Had there been some really famous actors in the cast, one could at least be happy seeing familiar faces and wondering at their ability to bulk up and become so muscular to possibly distract one from the overwhelming mediocrity of the rest of movie. But aside from David Wenham and arguably Rodrigo Santoro, the faces are anonymous and force you to pay attention to all the rest of the details without distraction. Again, I didn't hate the movie, but it is something I wouldn't be interested in viewing again. If someone really wanted to see it, I'd recommend paying more attention to Xerxes in all his gilded fabulousness and an early scene involving a writhing oracle. I genuinely liked those parts. Otherwise, I wish I'd rented it.
