Slow-Mo Makes Everything Better

I suppose this is a little late in the game, but can we talk about 300 a little? More specifically, how, as the first feature-length film shot entirely in slow motion, it is a groundbreaking achievement in cinematic excellence.

Now, far be it for me to drift into hoity-toity elitism ... but slow-motion makes everything better. Or, more specifically, messing around with the speed of a film can make it much more palatable to the senses. By slowing things down, viewers are able to notice the minutia and nuances of a performance, and generally soak in the film's dramatic-ness (it's a technical term). Similarly, slow-motion can take a good scene and make it better simply by making it longer! While the theatrical release of 300 comes in at just under 2 hours, the original "normal motion" cut lasts only about 35 minutes. Granted, these 35 minutes are filled with more blood, guts, man-thighs, 12-pack abs, torture, and dismemberments than your average red-white-and-blue-blooded ("red-blooded," to me, just reeks of Communism) American normally gets in a whole hour-long episode of 24, so it's not like we're missing out on anything like "plot" or "dialogue" as a result of the 35 minutes of actual film.

(Tangent: the thought just occurred to me: 300 ... 24 ... is there some connection between these gruesome works and their numerical titles? Is this some kind of game of chicken to see who can up the ante the most? The higher the number = more violence? Perhaps that's why 8 1/2 and Pi were kinda tame, and the horrors of 2001 unspeakable. But I digress...)

Anyway, the point is this: 300 is just 35 minutes of action, slowed down till it lengthens the film to 2 hours of box office excitement. Yet, 300 is not unique; there is a time-honored tradition of employing slow motion--albeit on a lesser scale--in more "respected" films. Take, for instance, this classic scene from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, where the eponymous character utters his famous last word: "Rosebud." (Spoiler: it's the jigsaw puzzle.)

Chilling. Incidentally, Welles originally shot this scene sped up--another well known technique of engaging the audience, as perfected by luminaries of the screen such as Benny Hill and Martin Scorsese. Fortunately, they included the original director's cut on the Kane DVD, which shows Welles' original vision of the above scene:

What a difference. Honestly, I don't know which one I prefer. And yet, the success of both techniques in Kane is not an aberration, as empirical evidence suggests that either will make any film better. Indeed, many consider director Robert Zemeckis' employment of slow motion for the floating feather in 1994's Forrest Gump to be key to that film's upset of Oscar favorites Dumb & Dumber and The Santa Clause. (Of course, this maxim does not always hold true, as 2003's slow motion extravaganza Seabiscuit lost to Lord of the Rings: The Return of the Profit King, in a blatant act of nerd-pandering.)

(Frickin' Legolas.)

Setbacks in recognition of cinematic excellence notwithstanding--we all know that an Oscar means crap--what is true here is that the amount a film uses slow motion or speed-upiness* is directly proportional to its quality as a work of art. This is not to say that the techniques are not controversial: at the time Kane was made, slow motion was widely considered a Communist plot to make impure our precious bodily essences, and the public backlash was much more the reason for Welles' blacklisting than the machinations of an inconsequential newspaper magnate. Yet, today the techniques are employed much more widely, and this has resulted in today's movies, on average, being superior to normal-motion tripe of yesteryear such as North By Northwest and Metropolis. I, for one, cheer on the continuance of slow motion's integration into films, and hail 300--the first all-slow motion film--as an achievement no less groundbreaking than colorization or the use of "Lux Aeterna" in every single epic movie trailer.

*Look it up.