With the success of 300, I don’t want to say that American film culture has hit rock bottom, per se, so let’s just say it’s reached further down into the stinking, shit-filled toilet so that its fingers are just barely scraping the bottom of the porcelain while pieces of fecal matter float and drift about and get caught up in its cuticles. We’ve certainly gone into enough detail at Reverse Shot about why 300 is best left for the war-mongers, those who fear the darkies, and drooling morons, and we certainly don’t need more evidence (a non-delighted “told ya so” is in order) as to why the film certainly should never have been made in this political climate, so let’s just have a moment of silence for a once-great medium that’s devolved into a sewage pit of all of its worst tendencies, from Leni Riefenstahl grandiosity to teenage-boy pandering. A very, very reliable source tells RS that director Zack Snyder is no slouch in the ultraconservative department, so any misgivings you may have had about his Dawn of the Dead remake can be safely validated, while those who just casually accepted its thorough dumbing down of one of horror cinema’s great allegorical works (”Hmmm…like, I guess I don’t miss the political undercurrent of the original because well, those zombies just move so awesomely fast. Dude!”) can watch 300’s similar bravado-without-critique with the same head-in-the-clouds obliviousness. Fuck you and die, 300, thanks for making this world a worse place.
