I did actually take two film courses while attending UB. One dealt with music in the movies, and the various ways in which music can be used to evoke emotions or make what we see on the screen more powerful. The other was actually in the History department, and in the course we had to watch a movie during Tuesday's class. By Thursday's class we had to have a report on the movie and how we thought it followed along with the themes of the day. The Empire Strikes Back was the most memorable of the films, obviously dealing with Cold War themes.
So while I am no expert on film by any means, I do know something about how ideas like this are formulated in the heads of academics and film critics when they review a film. I also know the difference between a film which INTENDS to speak about certain political themes versus a film that people take and apply their own interpretation to, whether it makes any sense or not.
The material for the film is taken from a Frank Miller work which was done before Bush or Iraq even took place. Unless he was a very special person there is no possible way for the work to have intended to address those themes, and even if that was the intention it would have been done poorly, as there are a myriad of ways to interpret Bush in that context.
M. Faust of our own beloved Artvoice doesn't buy it either. In his review of the film he mentions that he talked to the film maker, Zack Snyder, about this very topic. Here's a cut from the review:
"I guess that's unavoidable," he sighed. "I'm not going to pretend to be like, 'What's that, Iraq? There's a war going on? What are you talking about?' That's a reality of the world. I tried to make a movie that looks at the nobility of conflict, that asks if there is such a thing. I didn't do it in relationship to what's happening now because I don't have that much foresight - I wish I had. The point is that there can be nobility in sacrifice. Does that give context to sacrifice that we've maybe lost in the muddle of our current situation, is there a way to get that back? And also the story is 2,500 years old. Does history have some bad habit of being a big circle? Yeah. But is that part of my design? I don't think so."
The film maker himself says he didn't make the movie with the current problems in mind, and that he couldn't have in the first place. That is enough to satisfy my own curiosity about the intention of the film, and to not believe anyone who attributes something to the film that was never intended.
Does that mean that the film has no meaning? No, no way, the story behind it is incredible. No less a man than Jack Valenti said that the most important part of a movie is telling a story. The movie studios are fortunate to have a reviewer like the dude at the NYT because that increases the buzz and adds a financial boost to the revenue the film brings in. Of course a movie studio wouldn't do anything to stop the debate. Like any other industry their goal is to make profit on films.
Think about Norbit for a moment, a film that the critics absolutely thought was terrible. It has actually ended up bringing in at least $80 million so far, not too bad for a shitty movie. The movie studios don't necessarily have the academics/critics in mind all the time because they are notoriously hard to please compared with normal people. All this review did was make a bunch of people rich by injecting his own bullshit into the theme of a movie, and I'm sure the guy will get a nice fruit basket on Monday for his effort. Whatever we take from it is fine, and we can learn many things from the Spartans, but let's not talk about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the movie being a central theme.
