Kay Gaz ProFilm Reviews

Logline: In 480 BC, King Leonidas and 300 Spartans marches to Thermopylae to prevent the Persians, the greatest empire the world had ever seen, from conquering the rest of Greece.

Introduction
We live in an era where cinema of attractions thrives. Where graphic novel adaptations of superheroes and supervillains have taken over, the box offices and studios heavily rely on them to grow bigger and bigger. Where new marketing techniques are implemented to glue audiences onto every film, making it impossible to miss any. Not long before this era started spiralling out of control and cliffhangers becoming viral online, there was this graphic novel adaptation whose sole purpose was to give justice to its original source.

Zack Snyder’s 300 (2006) could be criticised in a number of ways. Historically is the most obvious one but one needs to keep in mind that the film has not been adapted from Herodotus’ texts. Its adaptation comes from Frank Miller’s and Lynn Varley’s homonymous graphic novel (1998). Therefore, I would like to focus on that type of filmmaking where the mise-en-scene1 is phenomenally accurately adapted through the extensive use of C.G.I.
My intention in this article is to research and inform you about my findings regarding this adaptation, how faithful it is, and why certain creative choices have been made behind specific aspects. I hope the analysis below sheds the intended light. Enjoy!

The Aim
Zack Snyder’s aim was not a Hollywood blockbuster but an incarnated version of the novel. He wanted the viewers to “live” this experience as if they were reading it; “a world of imagination” where everything is made. (Snyder: 300) The same vision – hence the collaboration – had Frank Miller, who wanted to duplicate the look of the novel “as close to a frame-by-frame, panel-by-panel visual recreation of the comics as you could imagine” and, in doing so, “the composition of the frames is the same; the camera angles are the same; and every line of dialogue, to the word, comes from the comics”. (Leith, 2005)

Larry Fong, 300‘s director of photography, claimed that “Frank’s book was the blueprint for the look of our film. We were not just making a film using his characters and story, we were specifically making a film out of his book so its style and compositions were integral to everything we were doing”. Miller, among others, quoted that “Movies are an extension that adds the dimension of time, space and movement to colour and composition.” (Williams 2007: A)

The Elements
The Wolf
A young Leonidas, in the midst of the cold, snowy night, is about to confront the wolf…
And for him to do so, Snyder, the production designer and the visual effects supervisor dissected every storyboard and its corresponding location. They used “a mixture of state-of-the-art animatronics along with a 3-D Computer Generated character” and either practical props, virtual elements, or a combination of the two to make every frame real. (DiLlulo 2007)

Determining lighting and composition were the first steps in creating the landscape and weather conditions from scratch.

Greenscreen vs Bluescreen
Fong mentions that during the preproduction shooting tests they tried everything on greenscreen but the result was not the expected one as they noticed some “weird colour fringing” which could not be explained. Later, they realised it was related to the red Spartan capes contrasting it. Ultimately, the analogy between bluescreen and greenscreen was 90% and 10%, respectively. (Williams 2007: A) Greenscreen was extensively used, only depicting Sparta. Sparta was half built and half C.G. as it was impossible to build it from scratch and impossible to create it purely virtually. (Snyder 2007: A)

Earth and water are what we only ask for…
From the moment the three hundred Spartans and Leonidas left Sparta, the real hard work started for Larry Fong and the Visual Effects Supervisor, Chris Watts. Every shot’s mise-en-scene should match their one and only source: the graphic novel! And realism was never the intention… “Our skies are created using a blend and watercolour elements giving the backgrounds a uniquely textured feel without being entirely painted” Fong quoted. Each sequence had to be treated differently as one size did not fit all. (DiLlulo 2007)

Spartans and Thespians meet before they walk side by side to meet death…
Frank Frazetta, responsible for the oil paintings of the landscapes, emphasised his ultimate goal: “…to give the film a close interpretation, especially in spirit”. Hence, no natural light or outdoor shooting. Fong adds that even if they had all the money in the world, they would not have accomplished Miller’s atmosphere in the real world because skies, for example, cannot be found in a surrealistic way like the novel’s depiction. Therefore, they kept everything C.G. in order to have them under absolute control without trying to trick the audience about what is real and what is not. (Williams 2007: B)

All of them lay eyes on the Persian fleet for the first time… With one ship hitting the other, and all of them hitting the rocks… Eventually swallowed by the dark waters…
Comparing and contrasting the narrative differences between the film and the graphic novel, there are tremendous differences in terms of chronological order but also in terms of emphasis on details. Snyder’s extensive fleet decimation C.G. sequence occupied only two pages in Miller’s novel. Snyder, though, prolonged the agony and dramatised it to the extreme. This is not your average visual effects sequence. This is Snyder’s vision encompassing CGI boats that are “pounded by realistic lookalike rendered waves”. (DiLlulo 2007)

Blood
The first day of battle begins… Endless killing and remorseless bloodbath…
Blood is integral to the “graphic deaths” in the film and the graphic novel. 2-D illustrative blood along with real make-up effects and “fake slabs of flesh” were the key ingredients to the real-like exit wounds. “Our blood is allowed to defy the laws of physics”, Snyder said, justifying the spears thrusting through the Persians, making blood explode from the exit wound rather than the entry point. Other than the two gallons of fake blood used, the rest was all added in post. (DiLlulo 2007)

Watts kept the artistic impact intact: “When he [Miller] keeps their representation quite graphic, using broad areas of light and shadow to define shapes with little focus on the intricate detail, our approach to the backgrounds, whether C.G. or built, has been to mimic the graphic style”. (DiLlulo 2007)

The Elephants
And the elephants were unleashed and armoured and carried the Persians into the battle…
Even though they were pre-visualised entirely 3-D that path did not yield the desired outcome. The first attempts were no match for Varley’s drawings so, the “wolf’s” tested recipe was applied.

While constructing the mise-en-scene, though, difficulties were presented when they had to switch from day to light and vice versa for almost every set. The lack of budget made Fong improvise: “The solution was to put up huge ½ CTB Silk3 so everything was slightly blue from the beginning putting us right in the middle of the colour-temperature zone. For a daytime look, we’d just go warmer in the timing and for night we’d go cooler”. A backlight in relation to the overall illumination was another factor that differentiated the daytime look from the nighttime. With constant backlight adaptations, they managed to adjust the dusk, the skies, and the sun. (Williams 2007: A)

Production designer Jim Bissell stated “It was a matter of taking the most iconographic frames from Frank’s book and build some kind of geography around them, because I don’t think he ever used wide establishing shots in the book”. The first thing Bissell did was to create a 3-D layout study for Thermopylae as a pre-visualization. Therefore, whenever Zack Snyder wanted to go through the battles, they had a concrete model to work on. Adding Photoshop paintings and the model became a solid foundation to experiment with. During pre-visualization, it was decided that in order to shoot both day and night in one studio, especially the surrealistic, picturesque landscapes, they would have to shoot in IMAX4. (Williams 2007: B)

Representative sequences are:

• As Xerxes stands atop, his fearless Immortals strike.
• Leonidas gives one last order.
• Before glorious death welcomes them to dine with Hades.
• The heroic, selfless act spread throughout Sparta and unoccupied Greece, resulting in Persian blood soaking the Greek soil for the last time.

Conclusion
300 fans and critics were divided. “Action and nothing more”, “C.G.I. is not a goal but a tool”, “American psychological warfare against Iran” (Anil Usumezbas: 2008), to name but a few, represent the criticism surrounding it. Among others, Todd McCarthy compared 300 to Sin City by saying that the former had not really much to offer than more colour, blood, and muscles, adding that cretinous giants, charging rhinos and giant elephants are too little effect. (McCarthy, 2007)

Maybe criticism will always derive from people who prefer the first version of the story they encounter or even the original medium – whichever comes first. Pascal Lefevre is adamant that films like 300 shouldn’t be judged as successful or unsuccessful adaptations but as films. (Lefevre, 2007) Old Boy, for example, was a disturbing yet successful film where almost none of the Western spectators who watched it had not read (or were not even aware of) the original manga.

Social media nowadays over-hype commercial films [see Avengers: Endgame (2019)] or condemn them before they are even released [see X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)]. What is going to happen? How is it going to happen? Who is going to make it and who isn’t? The “agonising” anticipation nowadays drives people to the cinema. Whether the satisfaction levels will be met or not in the end is another story for another time. In 300, the audience knew what is going to happen. They knew how it is going to happen. And they knew who is going to make it and who isn’t. They knew it all. Except for the magic behind shooting an entire film that allegedly takes place in Greece’s Mediterranean ecosystem in a single studio. The surrealistic visual illustration that fuses history with fantasy and delivers to the action genre fans.

Yes, the significance of the beard and the use of the shield have been mitigated, and the historical inaccuracies are beyond counting. But then, none of the actors is of Greek (or Persian) decent, no one speaks ancient Greek, and half of the cast had their chests shaved and went on steroids. The film’s genre is Action/Fantasy/War, derives straight from the graphic novel, and does not try to fool anyone. It comprises 1,523 cuts, of which 1,300 contain 8631 visual effect elements. It knows exactly where it stands and for all the right reasons. Critics missing the creative effort of thousands of people put into this film and focusing on its misinterpretation sounds like a (non)professional attempt to make their name stand out and for all the wrong reasons.

Notes

1. Mise-en-scene: In the original French, mise en scène (pronounced meez-ahn-sen) means “putting into the scene”… Film scholars, extending the term to film direction, use the term to signify the director’s control over what appears in the film frame: setting, lighting, costume and makeup, and staging and performance. (Bordwell, Thompson, 13)

2. C.G.I.: Computer-Generated Imagery: Any image that has been created entirely on the computer. (Goulekas 2001, 71)

3. CTB Silk: A colour gel or colour filter, also known as lighting gel or simply gel, is a transparent coloured material that is used in theatre, event production, photography, videography and cinematography and to colour light and for colour correction. (Goulekas 2001, 112)

4. IMAX: A widescreen system that uses 65 mm film running horizontally through the camera to capture an area spanning across 15 perforations. The image area captured is more is more than ten times greater than a standard 35 mm frame and three times larger than a 65 mm frame. IMAX is projected onto a large, curved screen on 70 mm film. (Goulekas 2001, 246)

Bibliography
• 300, 2007: A. Directed by Zack Snyder. [DVD: 1], USA” Warner Brothers
• 300, 2007: B. Directed by Zack Snyder. [DVD: 2], USA” Warner Brothers
• 300 – The official site. (2007) <http://www.300ondvd.com/300.htm > [Accessed 15 April 2010]
• Bordwell, D., Thompson, K. (2003). Film Art: An Introduction, 7th ed. New York: McGraw–Hill.
• DiLullo T. (2007) 300: The Art of the Film, Dark Horse Comics
• Gordon, I. Jancovich, M. McAllister P. (2007) Film and Comic Books, University Press Of Mississippi / Jackson
• Goulekas E. K. (2001) Visual Effects in A Digital World: A Comprehensive Glossary of over 7000 Visual Effects Terms, Morgan Kaufmann
• Leith, S, (2005) Black and White and Noir All Over. Daily Telegraph, p.12
• McCarthy, T. (2007) Battle of the Bulges. Variety, p. 41
• Williams, D. E (2007: A) Few Against Many. The American Cinematographer, p.52
• Williams, D. E (2007: B) The Future Is Now. The American Cinematographer, p.14
• Usumezbas, A. (2008) The Long Take, Top 10 Comic Book / Graphic Novel Adaptations – On Superheroes And More. Available at <http://www.long-take.com/2008/08/top-10-comic-bookgraphic-novel.html> [Accessed 14 April 2010]

Thanks for reading!

Please, don’t forget to share and subscribe. If you enjoy my work and dedication to films, please feel free to support me on https://www.patreon.com/kaygazpro. Any contribution is much appreciated and valued.

Solidarity for all the innocent lives who suffer the atrocities of war!

Stay safe!