Frank Miller's 300 the Movie: From The Pages of a Comic Book to the Silver Screen

Frank Miller’s 300 the movie is probably the few adaptations of comic books to films that has managed to stay true to the original source and the success the movie 300 made globally is a testament of such, however in every successful film there is always the downsides of it especially if the original source is a comic book and therefore there is the expectations between the comic reader audience and the cinema audience.

It is true that 300, though it has captured the concept of its graphic novel, and has additional scenes that we could say is for cinematic purpose and isn’t simply ‘a rehash ‘.To a certain degree it challenges the criticism made by “French Director Alain Resnais when he stated in the 1990, “Till today I haven’t seen a cinematographic adaptation of a comic, which seems to add something to the original work, they have always been rehashes” (Thomas 247; Pascal Lefevre, 2007, 1) To explain further the movie 300 represents at least 90% of the graphic novel, perhaps not in chronological manner of the graphic novel, for example in the graphic novel the upbringing and initiation of King Leonidas spreads throughout the five chapters unlike the movie the events is presented in the beginning to the audience. Despite the success of 300 there is the matter of a few downsides when it comes to adaptation, in this case a graphic novel, to cinema; I will discuss and make comparison of the scenes, both the film and novel, from where the Persian main messenger talks with King Leonidas to their deaths in Sparta.

In the article Incompatible visual ontologies ( Pascal Lefevre, 2007, 3-4) Pascal mentions four problematic aspects of adaptation, which are: 1. Deletion and Addition process, 2.) Characteristics of comic page layout and...

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...ng the reader a sound of that panel.

There will always be adaptation problems when it comes to comic books to novels because the challenges and expectations between the comic readers and film audience however Frank Miller’s 300 has to be one of the successful adaptation comic films.

REFERENCES

Lefevre, Pascal. “Incompatible Visual Ontologies? – The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images. In Film and Comic Books, edited by Mark Jancovich, Matthew P McAllister and Ian Gordan, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007, 1 – 13.

McCloud, Scott. “Time Frames”, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York : HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.

300 pictures. Martin Aquino. http://www.martinaquino.wordpress.com/ 01 March 2010.

BIBLIOGRAPGHY

The Best film of 2007. Rebecca Murray. http://www.moviesabout.com/300review/ 01 March 2010.