‘300’ generates strong reactions

Right now, the movie title “300” refers to the number of sword-slingin’, codpiece-sportin’ Spartans who fought a behemoth horde of Persian invaders in the famous fifth century B.C. Battle of Thermopylae.

In another couple of months, though, it could be a reference to the combat film’s cumulative box office, as in $300 million – thanks in large part to the gamer generation.

Over the weekend, the no-star “300” took the multiplexes by storm – and Hollywood by surprise – by earning $70 million in three days.

That’s $30 million more than even the most optimistic forecasts, including those from Warner Bros., which released the film.

It puts “300” in the record books as the third-biggest opening for an R-rated movie ever, after only Mel Gibson’s equally violent “The Passion of the Christ” and the Wachowski brothers’ equally cyber-spacey “The Matrix Reloaded.”

Not to mention the biggest March opening ever, and biggest Imax opening.

And all this despite a pretty dramatic thrashing by critics.

At metacritic.com, a tally of 32 reviews nationwide gave “300” a meager 53 rating out of a possible 100.

At the high end, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Gianni Truzzi gushed, “Wholesale human slaughter never looked so pretty!” At the low end, the Village Voice’s Nathan Lee sneered, “It’s a ponderous, plodding, visually dull picture.”

But nowhere has the reaction been stronger than in Iran, where officials say the film insults their ancient Persian culture.

Javad Shamghadri, cultural adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calls it an attempt to “humiliate” Iran in order to “provoke American soldiers and warmongers.”

Indeed, “300” – with its sloganeering freedom-fighters (“No retreat! No surrender!”) striking fear into an alien-looking enemy representing “tyranny and mysticism” – taps into a certain militaristic, xenophobic mind-set.

But that’s not where most of that $70 million came from. It came from a behemoth horde of Xbox-ers making a rare excursion to the cinema.

During filming at a warehouse in Montreal, a cast of buffed-up, Coppertoned actors – led by “The Phantom of the Opera’s” Gerard Butler (as Sparta’s King Leonidas) – engaged in elaborately choreographed combat sequences, dressed in capes and jockstraps, battling the multipierced, freakish Persians against a green-screen backdrop.

All of the sepia-hued thunderheads, all of the magic-hour sunbeams and altitudinous cliffscapes were filled in later by console-tweaking digital renderers.

And the movie looks like pretend – like the actors have been sucked into a vacuum-sealed video game. Even the blood is computer-generated.

And that, in large part, is why “300” is a hit. Its visual vernacular, rife with heavily manipulated effects shots and fight sequences that have the not-quite-real hyper-reality of games like God of War or Devil May Cry, is recognizable to the zillion-strong legion of gamer geeks – lured from their dark nerd-caves to a theater near you.

“We’ve been cultivating the techie crowd of 15-to-24-year-olds who play video games and watch DVDs,” said Greg Foster, the chairman of the giant-format Imax theater chain. (The film is not playing at Spokane’s Imax Theater in Riverfront Park.)