300 Wasn't About The Characters

Guy Hasson writes a terrific blog on dramatic writing, but I totally think he misses the point with his post on the movie 300.

How spoiled and out-of-touch is a society, when its men’s fantasies of being real men look like this?

300 wasn't about men, whether real or unreal. 300 was about a new aesthetic for action movies, influenced by video games, manga, and anime; pioneered by Underworld, The Matrix The Chronicles of Riddick, and Sin City; explicitly identified by Joel Silver in the "Making Of..." special feature on the Matrix DVD; and guaranteed to crop up more and more as time goes on.

It's true that the writing isn't always great in these movies (although there definitely are exceptions), but that's OK from a studio point of view because people still go to see them. Even though great writing remains a great thing for a movie to have - which is why The Matrix did better than Underworld - the reality is that studios make movies to make money. But this trend is actually a good thing. It's raising the bar visually. A decade from now, if your writing requires the finished movie to have a totally unique visual style, that won't be an issue. In fact, if this trend continues, scripts which require unique visual styles may in fact become more valuable than scripts that don't.

Anyway, even though I disagree with Guy here, overall, his blog is a great blog. Check it out.