Film 150% style, -50% substance.
If anyone knows Zack Snyder, by now you may have realized two things about him:
1. He sucks at plot
2. He's fantastic with creating a comic-like imagery on camera.
He has the ability to really direct movies and action scenes in a way that looks like it came straight out of a comic book. High contrast images along with quick movement linking slow-motion frames. Some people complain about the slow motion disrupting the action. I think it's just the opposite - the slow motion frames are the ones to pay attention to; they are straight out of an illustration. The movement and action in between are just to link to the next panel of the comic in this movie.
So, that's basically what 300 is. It's an action film. With style. It's got minimal plot, and basically everything is an excuse for Manly Men to do Manly Things. It is absolutely style over substance, but that's pretty much the point of this film. The good guys are so manly they have their exposed abs instead of armour. The villains are ugly mutated freaks, or faceless mooks.
Don't look for anything remotely related to the real-life event it's based on. It tries to have a message, but again, looking into the real-life history of Sparta completely undermines that message. Don't think about it too hard. In fact, don't think at all, just watch.
Film Meh...
A more accurate title for this film would have been 'Extremely Heterosexual Males' (well, not 'extremely'), every guy I know has seen in and there's a lot of hacking off of limbs, spurting blood and bizarre slow-motion scenes but it's lacking in plot. In the end the only bit of the movie I remembered was that Persian man falling into that oddly placed pit.
Heh-heh. Good times.
Film Zack Snyder's One and Only True Hit
Once upon a time, there was a goose who, under the extremely optimal and precise conditions, laid a single golden egg. In the beginning, we all flocked to see this goose and its egg, and we all wondered what it would do next.
What followed was the goose laying a silver and then bronze egg, followed by eggs of iron, brass, then protactinium (look it up), and copper, before settling into the habit of popping out eggs of zinc and tin.
How did this happen? How did the goose go from gold to tin? How long is this analogy going to hold up?
Well, the answer to two of those questions can best be summed up like this:
I think Zack Snyder just got lucky with 300.
When the film came out, it had this sheer undiluted balls-to-the-wall over-the-top charm that had never been seen before. It was basically that year's guiltiest pleasure. Or, to put it more simply, it was Camp to Hell and back.
The raw, over-the-top machismo of the 300 made even the cheesiest lines seem grand and epic in scale. Don't believe me? Ask yourself, why was "THIS! IS! SPARTA!" the the breakout line? Because it was silly. It was dumb. Gerard Butler literally did it as a joke, but it gave the film this fun self-aware irony that made it more accessible.
This is, of course, all to say that I don't think Mr. Snyder himself really understood the big joke of the movie or why it was successful to begin with. In his mind, he was making a Genre Throwback to the grand Epic Movie format of the 50s and 60s, just with modern CGI to construct the elaborate set-designs and money-shots. To him, this was a serious historical war drama, not the Affectionate Parody that it actually was. How do I know? Because people asked him for years if the film was intended to be propaganda or not (and he gives mixed messages about it every time), and not one of his films afterward had that level of camp-value that made 300 such a crossover hit.
The 300 sequel certainly didn't have that ironic self-awareness that gave its predecessor the crucial campy edge–playing its hyper-masculinity and outrageous spectacle fights more-or-less straight, and was thus less entertaining.
There's still the undeniable camp-factor in his other movies, but Snyder is clearly trying for a more artistic and high-brow approach that just doesn't work; it's not playing to his strengths.
300 made Zack Snyder's career, but probably in all the wrong ways because it was the epitome of "lightning in a bottle"–he could never replicate its success. But I think that's because he didn't understand what made it good in the first place.