Fans of sterile, ham-fisted comic book adaptations, get ready to misplace your enthusiasm all over again: Frank Miller is nearing completion on his 6-part “300” prequel comic “Xerxes,” and “300” movie director Zack Snyder and producer Thomas Tull are standing by ready to pounce on the finished product. “If it’s awesome and compelling,” says Snyder “then, yes, we’re interested.” The pages they’ve read have, it appears, lived up to their earlier expectations.
The story, according to Miller, starts at the battle of Marathon a decade before Thermopylae, and “will be the same heft as ‘300’ but it covers a much, much greater span of time — it’s 10 years, not three days. This is a more complex story … so much larger.” It features gods and warriors galore (Xerxes is pursuing godhood), and Miller hints at a potentially massive set piece involving either or both of the Athenian and Persian naval fleets, which we can already see becoming a masterclass in the art of copy-pasting sails onto a seascape for some poor FX grunt.
Miller however, to his credit, claims that the prospect of the movie spectacle does not inform his comic work: “I just want it to be as good a comic book as it can be. It’s up to Zack and company to make it work as a film.” And there’s the rub. Because if, as he claims, this story is more complex and more morally ambiguous than “300” (not hard, to be honest), well, look what Snyder did to the complex, morally-ambiguous “Watchmen” graphic novel; his is a technique that seems to broaden and flatten his subject matter and make sure all the peaks and troughs are steamrolled out. Which is fine if you’re surfacing a road, just not great for the nuance and shading that a decent narrative movie requires.
This is potentially a problem for more than just us, the popcorn-chewing, paying public; the portrayal of Xerxes in “300” as a degenerate androgynous pervert, contrasted with the nobility and honor of his (white) opponents already sparked a minor diplomatic incident, with the Iranian government considering the film “…hostile behavior, which is the result of cultural and psychological warfare.” Yikes. While we can think of some filmmakers who we would possibly trust with the future of East/West relations, Snyder isn’t one of them.
Miller, for his part, while he denies that his decision to focus the new comic on Xerxes is in any way a reaction to those charges of cultural insensitivity, claims “I do my best to crawl inside his head rather than have him be this iconic force that simply commands this huge army. There are many scenes with him alone or just with his people … there are several scenes where … he’s shown speaking to his mother and his wife … he becomes that much more interesting a character.” Whoa, there: we’re not only getting a brown person with some human depth, we’re also getting two women with speaking roles (assuming the mother and the wife are not the same person)? If so, it’s a move on indeed from “300” in the sensitivity stakes, right?
Well, maybe not so much. “Xerxes” for all it’s about the Persian leader is still told through the eyes of a (presumably white again) Greek – this time an Athenian called Themistocles. Nicknamed “the subtle serpent” he does seem a far more interesting and nuanced protagonist than Leonidas in “300”, but again, not difficult – was there ever a lead character who had less of an arc than Leo (born a noble hero, noble hero as a kid, became a nobly heroic king, died a heroically noble death)?
Leonidas himself, it should also be mentioned, is one of two characters from “300” who will reappear (the other being Ephialtes the Spartan traitor) and though back in September ‘08 we reported that Gerard Butler definitively stated he would not be returning for any “300” sequel, well, that was 2008 and before he had gone on his serial crime spree against modern cinema with “The Bounty Hunter,” “The Ugly Truth,” “Law Abiding Citizen,” and others, so who knows?
All we do know is this: with “300” grossing $456 million worldwide and the early pages of “Xerxes” checking Snyder’s ‘awesome’ box, this thing is almost certainly going to happen. Whether it will be subtle, nuanced and morally complex, or 20 minutes of film stretched out to feature length through excessive use of extreme slo-mo, we don’t yet know. However the Iranian Academy of the Arts filed a complaint with the UN over “300” claiming it was “nothing less than an attack on the historical identity of a nation,” so you can be sure they’ll be looking closely at this one too. Which means if it stinks perhaps we can get Nelson Mandela or Kofi Annan or someone else with Morgan Freeman-like gravitas to step in and order Snyder to just… stop. You know, not because his movies are bad or anything, but for the sake of world peace.