Batman: Year One

Perhaps aware that a great deal of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's original piece was gobbled up by the Christopher Nolan franchise (enough that, reportedly, at least Miller was cut a cheque), Sam Liu, Lauren Montgomery, and Tab Murphy's adaptation of Batman: Year One doesn't attempt to swell events with tacked on action spectacle. Instead we get a lean, mean war journal; bulletin events and headlines from the first twelve months of Batman's war on crime. A few dopey clarification lines aside, Miller's headache speak survives intact, dominating the film's mood and motor. Mazzucchelli isn't quite so lucky. The outline of the artist's figure frames remain, but they've lost their scratchy, sweaty quality. Likewise, the putrid colours of the newsstand issues are lost to pastels. Aside from Ed McGuinness's action figure drafts, these DC OVAs have struggled to replicate individual artistic ticks. Year One is no exception, but at least Miller's writing is allowed to pop.

Benjamin McKenzie reads Miller with the dull clip of total psychosis. A performance, and presentation, unafraid to portray a multimedia character thinking like a serial killer. Bryan Cranston synchronises perfectly with James Gordon, the actor incapable of giving any reading that doesn't throb with a wounded, conflicted masculinity. Cranston is adept at finding the dark, secret corners of married males - the light frenzy of leadership, or the cold-sweat panic of responsibility. Cranston gamely plays along as Miller's writing exposes the heroic Gordon in unheroic ways, creating flaws and imperfections that colour, rather than void, Gotham's human face of justice.

We've had many Miller adaptations in the last few years, but none of them, not even the Miller co-directed Sin City, have given a complete account of his beguiling, hysterical ability. Sin City deleted the abuse and illness that informed a lunatic like Marv. Zack Snyder's 300 forgot to acknowledge that Leonidas knew he was a fascist battling on behalf of someone else's democratic ideal. Miller's skill is that he can place a recognisable psychological state within the confines of comic reality. He invests his characters with fanatical drives and masochistic kinks that play like truth in worlds teaming with super-identities. This Batman then is the closest yet to full-Miller. Find his indelible mark in the lack of excuse used to justify Bruce Wayne's behaviour. There are no asides to contextualise scenes in which Batman promises to mutilate a criminal. Gordon is framed considering his gun while his heavily pregnant wife sleeps. There is no levity, just the suffocating desire to punish. Extremity of thought, as well as action. This is Frank Miller. He trades in seizure chivalry.

300

A fighting fantasied up re-telling of the Battle of Thermopylae. 300 Spartan hoplites (and hundreds more, apparently lesser Greek allies) hold a narrow rock passage against the invading forces of the  Persian empire. 300 opens, screaming and wailing, with a clipped rundown of Spartan society and their terrifying, fascistic agoge training system. This sequence is easily the best of director Zack Snyder's additions to Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's panoramic, fully-painted history book. Other detours from Miller's utterly romanticised source range from simply less successful to so unwelcome as to be alarming.

Lena Headey's Queen Gorgo is expanded too, transformed from Miller's Elektra shaped rock-at-home to the canny political thinker that Herodotus wrote about in his Histories. While supporting her king's ambitions from home, the Queen fends off all manner of lunges from Dominic West's sleazy Theron. It's a real stinker then that Gorgo's rallying speech is an attempt at a war on terror allegory, one utterly at odds with the historical understanding of Sparta, and even Miller's (sometimes less than accurate) take on the warrior tribe. A key (excised here) line from the fifth issue of the Miller / Varley series notes the inherent irony of the Spartan few battling to preserve a social equality that they themselves do not practice: "I didn't ask (for your allegiance). Leave democracy to the Athenians, boy." The fanatical, suicidal programming of the Spartans has more in common with the asymmetrical warfare practised by the occupied than any US citizen currently serving abroad.

Snyder's take on the Persian empire is absurd and fantastical too. Facing the Spartans is a mish-mash of trolls, inbred teeth filers, goat headed musicians, and techno-magik wizards. As if the promise of an army drawn from countries spanning Asia, Africa and Europe was not quite interesting enough for the filmmakers. The Achaemenid Empire is headed up by the ten foot tall Xerxes, who appears less like Miller's pierced, Maasai God, and more like the androgynous Ra from Stargate. There's rarely a Persian glimpsed that isn't deformed, caricatured or monstrous in some way. It's akin to a video game rogues gallery in terms of needless spice ups. Still, 300 has the same dementedly macho appeal as John Millius' Conan The Barbarian: huge, psychotic men drifting, machine-like, through endless streams of incompetent foes. 

At least the doggedly laconic dialogue that Miller transcribed from documented history survives the transition between mediums completely intact. Adding a kind of absurd levity to the grimness. Otherwise, much of the film rests on Gerard Butler's shoulders, the actor always convincing as a soldier king leading his men, screaming and shouting, to their doom. Battle scenes are almost nasty enough too; excelling during the slow, deliberate phalanx pushes but stalling when cycling through the distracting, digital-looking motions of one men armies. The artificial haste introduced into these speed-manipulated sequences only detracts from what looks like solid, calculated choreography. The eventual dispatch of the 300 is far too brief and neat as well, lacking Miller's constant, piercing avalanche of black and white arrows. 300's key appeal then is that of a handful of men not only facing absurdly overwhelming odds and believing they can win, but these warriors also expecting to absolutely piss it and be back home for their tea.