The Epic Film in World Culture

Robert Burgoyne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781135855345
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

With the recent release of spectacular blockbuster films from Gladiator to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the epic has once again become a major form in contemporary cinema. This new volume in the AFI Film Readers series explores the rebirth of the epic film genre in the contemporary period, a period marked by heightened and conflicting appeals to national, ethnic, and religious belonging.The orginal essays in this volume explore the tension between the evolving global context of film production and reception and the particular provenance of the epic as an expression of national mythology and aspirations, challenging our understanding of epics produced in the present as well as our perception of epic films from the past. The contributors will explore new critical approaches to contemporary as well as older epic films, drawing on ideas from cultural studies, historiography, classics, and film studies.

part one
spectacle

one
“this is sparta!”

the reinvention of epic in zack snyder’s 300

monica silveira cyrino

“Experience history at swordpoint … and moviemaking with a cutting edge.”¹ The DVD cover of the Warner Bros. film 300, directed by Zack Snyder (2007), delivers its seductive selling points with uncommon accuracy, as well as a refreshing lack of irony, for no epic film promises a more compelling alliance of gripping historical narrative content with arresting and ground-breaking visual form. With a budget of just under $65 million, much of it spent on technological innovations in cinematic computer graphics, Snyder’s 300 is an unapologetically brawny and surprisingly zesty take on the recently reborn genre of “ancient” epic films, offering a rousing and spectacular-looking recreation of one of the most universally signifi-cant and heroic events in world history: the story of the battle of Thermopylae.²

a new epic

The film 300 derives its title from the number of Spartan warriors who, led by their indomitable king, Leonidas, held the narrow pass at Thermopylae on the northern coast of Greece against the massive forces of the Persian Army assembled by King Xerxes.³ This small but elite band of Spartans held the Persian invaders at the “Hot Gates” for three brutal days in the late summer of 480 bc, just long enough for the cantankerous city-states of Ancient Greece to join together and mobilize their forces to repel the overwhelming enemy assault from the East. Likewise, the film premiered in heroic form, conquering all early estimations and instantly garnering legend ary status. Released on March 9, 2007, Snyder’s 300 reaped an astonishing and record-breaking $71 million on its opening weekend, with the largest-ever box-office total in March history and the third-highest for any R-rated film, leading one film critic to note: “The industry was stunned by the magnitude of the Spartan victory.”⁴ The film went on to earn an amazing domestic box-office total of $211 million and soon proved its global popularity with a worldwide total gross of $456 million, nearly matching the $458 million worldwide gross of the sword-and-sandal genre’s undisputed champion, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000).⁵ After the relative disappointments of Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004), which posted only $133 million in domestic gross (far less than the $175 million production budget), and Oliver Stone’s critically lambasted Alexander (2004), earning less than $35 million at home (barely making a dent toward the $155 million production costs), the staggering commercial success of Snyder’s 300 provides strong leather-clad support for any filmmaker who wishes to reach back to hallowed antiquity for story inspiration.⁶

The film is based on 300, the vivid graphic novel written and illustrated by artist Frank Miller.⁷ While enjoying a cult following as the creator of several popular graphic novels going back to the 1980s, Miller had recently made his mark on the cinema world when he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez a successful film version of his graphic novel Sin City (2005).⁸ Notably, the graphic novel 300 had a cinematic pedigree before it even became a film: Miller says he was inspired by the earlier epic film, The 300 Spartans (1962), directed by Rudolph Maté and starring Richard Egan as King Leonidas.⁹ When he first saw the film as a young boy, Miller was captivated by the powerful story of the fearless Spartan unit and their Alamo-like last stand against the imperial Persian invasion. Miller recalls how his view of what it means to be a hero evolved after watching Maté’s film: “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.”¹⁰ The historical battle of Thermopylae, one of the most glorious and influential moments in Greek history, is recounted with lively narratives and snappy dialogue by the great Greek historian, Herodotus (c. 484–425 bc) in his work The Histories; and the Spartans’ ultimate sacrifice is commemorated in the famous epigram by the contemporary Greek poet, Simonides of Ceos (556–469 bc): “Go tell the Spartans, passerby: that here, by Spartan law, we lie.”¹¹ Miller borrows this and many other memorable lines directly from the Ancient Greek sources and uses them liberally throughout his graphic novel. For example, when ordered by the Persians to hand over their weapons, the Spartan king Leonidas yells back the tart rejoinder, “Come and get them,” a line lifted precisely from the Greek biographer, Plutarch (c. ad 45–125).¹² Or when a Persian emissary warns that their flying mass of arrows will blot out the sunlight, a Spartan officer gives the terse reply, “Then we will fight in the shade.”¹³ By using the Ancient Greek sources in this realistic way, Miller injects an evocative sense of history and epic grandeur into his graphic novel.

Just as Miller drew on the Greek sources, so director and co-screen-writer Snyder respects Miller’s original artistic imagination in creating his film version. Snyder, who had made his feature film debut directing a brilliant remake of George Romero’s zombie classic Dawn of the Dead (2004), saw himself more as a “steward of another person’s vision” rather than the architect of his own, such that whenever he had to make a creative decision, he asked himself, “What would Frank do?”¹⁴ Snyder meticulously follows Miller’s stirring narrative, images, and dialogue as he recreates the graphic novel’s austere aesthetic vision in his high-concept film. The film was shot almost entirely in a warehouse in Montreal, using bare, simple stages and minimalist sets. To add a third dimension to Miller’s page, Snyder skillfully employs blue-screen technology in filming the actors; then computer technicians fill in the background imagery, digitally shading every frame in intense hues of storm, smoke and metal. “For Snyder it was simply the only way to get the look of Miller’s 300 off the page and onto the big screen,” as one critic explains.¹⁵ With more carnage and gore than Gladiator and Troy combined, 300 comes by its R rating honestly, if not discreetly. The film is spectacularly violent, but the violence reveals a heavy dose of post-Matrix cinematic stylization: the battle scenes are edited in the now familiar slow-to-fast-motion photographic technique known as “bullet time,” where the frame slows down to capture a warrior lunging to hurl his spear and then speeds up again to show computer-generated blood gushing artfully from impaled torsos and severed heads. As an added ben-efit to its eye-popping visual impact, the computer-generated bloodshed from all the skewered bodies and decapitations would also prove to be easier to calibrate digitally if the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board became too squeamish. The overall choreographic effect, as described by the director’s wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder, was like “a ballet of death.”¹⁶ And the end result is a stunning virtual recreation of this authentic yet highly idealized moment in history when a band of Spartan warriors refused to surrender their freedom and so saved the Greek-speaking world.

With so much visual artifice, the only “real” thing in the film is the well-toned physical presence of the actors. Snyder decided to cast non-Hollywood types in the principal roles, since less-well-known actors would keep initial costs down and a more international cast would make the film easier to market later during overseas distribution. As the noble King Leonidas, Scottish actor Gerard Butler is leonine and somber as he growls his famous battlefield one-liners through the bronze face-mask of his helmet. When Butler roars in his thick highland brogue, “Spahhhrrr-TANZ, prepare for glohhhrrry!,” the viewer half expects the cast of warrior clansmen from Braveheart (1995) to appear on the scene wearing tartan sashes and blue war paint. Butler, a relative unknown except as the Phantom in the recent film version of The Phantom of the Opera (2004), was generally praised by critics in his star-making role as the Spartan king: “Butler’s turn as the impossibly muscled Leonidas may be the most ferocious performance since Russell Crowe’s Maximus.”¹⁷ Vincent Regan, who played Achilles’ loyal lieutenant Eudorus in Troy, fixes his intense blue-eyed stare on the special Spartan forces as Leonidas’ experienced right-hand man, known only as the Captain. His eldest son, Astinos, played by Tom Wisdom, joins the fateful band of warriors to add a measure of familial pathos to the storyline.¹⁸ David Wenham, familiar to movie fans as Faramir in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), is the trusted warrior Dilios, who, on Leonidas’ orders, takes the thrilling tale of the battle back home to Sparta. As in the graphic novel, Dilios serves as the narrator of the story, and his voice-over narration frames the film while allowing the director to unfold the story more imaginatively from one Spartan warrior’s subjective perspective.

The actors were put through a grueling, eight-week training and diet regimen to make them look and fight like Spartans: those bulging muscles are thoroughly real, accentuated only by tan make-up and body oil. Indeed, the exceptionally healthy-looking cast led one irreverent critic to dub the film a “Spartan workout video.”¹⁹ With little to go on from the historical record about Spartan combat techniques, fight choreographer Damon Caro, who also choreographed the stunts in Fight Club (1999), devised a blend of mainly Asian styles of martial arts for the warriors to use in Snyder’s film. While the Spartans most likely did not go to battle wearing just long red capes and leather briefs, their bare abdominal muscles rippling with every sword thrust, the filmmakers chose to stay true to Miller’s pictorial vision as laid out on the page. Snyder also wanted to create a film that would attract an audience beyond the young male fan base of the graphic novel: “The buff, largely unclad Spartans are also the producers’ main hope of getting anyone other than straight men to see 300.”²⁰ With so many strikingly fit, half-naked male bodies on display, not surprisingly the film attained a degree of celebrity in popular culture for having a somewhat homoerotic sensibility. At the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, comedian and host Sarah Silverman quipped, “They got the name 300 by measuring how gay it was on a scal...

Table of contents

• Previously published in the AFI Film Readers series
• contents
• illustrations
• acknowledgments
• introduction
• part one spectacle
• part two center and periphery
• part three remembering the nation
• part four the family epic
• part five the body in the epic
• contributors
• filmography
• index