I thought the queen was hot. And that dance by the oracle on the mountaintop… smokin.
That was enough for me.
Back to the OP question about the hunchback. I imagine any of the Spartans would just killed him out of hand, as an abomination that shouldn’t have been allowed to survive infancy.
Yeah, he was.
I went with a group of friends just for Gerard Butler. I didn’t (and don’t) care about action films or history (especially Greek history). But I couldn’t pass up the chance to see hundreds of men in leather underwear all at once.
That’s the spirit!
The thing about 300 was it had one of the greatest trailers in recent memory. From the imagery to the crushing Nine Inch Nails groove. All I could think was “I have GOT to see this”.
Re. slavish devotion to the comic book (as Tuckerfan mentioned): My big, big beef with this movie was that it slavishly adhered to various scenes from the comic (with the occasional, er, “embellishment”…the oracle was neither half-naked nor bilingual) while absolutely trashing the story as presented by Frank Miller. The liberties taken from beginning to end are truly astounding, and the rampant politicizing is downright offensive. I think it speaks volumes that Miller was allowed about 20 seconds of commentary on the DVD; it’s pretty obvious that he did not like how this turned out.
Anyway, smiling bandit brought up quite a few issues, so it’s only fair that I direct my response to the OP.
This is simply the difference between two people making a series of comic books and a great big bunch of writers, directors, producers, and editors making a blockbuster movie. No doubt they found disciplined, controlled phalanx combat just plain boring, and figured audiences would as well. Leonidas is also much more callous in the original comic (to the point where Ephiates attempts suicide!), never coming across that he’s trying to let him off gently.
Don’t know, inasmuch as none of it was Frank Miller’s creation. No sword-armed executioner, no Goroesque unstoppable destroyer, no lizard-faced Immortals. (No “magicians”, either.) My guess is that the novel isn’t extremely blatant about the Persians being evil…sure, Xerxes is arrogant and power-hungry and the ambassador is a snob who sticks his neck out way too much, but for the most part, the army is mostly a bunch of guys doing a job who happen to be way over their heads. Apparently, somone decided that we really, really needed a reason to root against them. (I figure that’s the same rationale for the Dead Naked Bodies Tree, which also was not in the comic.)
Join the club. I hated this garbage. Just to keep things in perspective, the wife gets one page in the comic. And the messenger in the opening scene didn’t object to her talking to him. My guess was that someone in production demanded it, or it was a feeble attempt to get women to watch a hack-and-slash gorefest.
This part didn’t really stand out for me, but I’m guessing it was a badly bungled interpretation of what Frank Miller really wanted to get at. What Miller criticized was injustice and mindlessly clinging to the old ways. A good society progresses and discards ideas, practices, and laws that prove to be unjust.
What went wrong here, IMO, was the marginalization of the Ephors. THEY were the useless geezers stuck in the past, THEY were the ones who turned on Sparta for gold, THEY were the ones stifling the spread of freedom. (Of course, reality was a litttle more complicated than that, but that’s defintiely how it played out in the comic.) Instead we have a Star Wars-esque council meeting, all kinds of political flapdoodle, and a totally made-up character who seemingly serves no purpose other than an excuse to inject aformentioned feminizing (he’ll always be “Gratuitus” to me), to the point where the whole message is muddled beyond repair.
Yeah. Don’t forget, too, that the problem wasn’t convincing Sparta to go to battle. They’re Spartans, fer chrissake; battle is their reason for living. It was the Carneia, and later the Spartans’ foolish provinciality (clearly shown in The 300 Spartans, BTW), that ultimately doomed Leonidas. What the point of Gratuitus was other than some unnecessary nookie and some campy dialogue, I haven’t a clue.
Yeah, and especially since in the comic, Dilios himself announces the Athenian navy’s triumph to the Spartan army. I dunno…maybe inclduing this after Leonidas had called them “boy lovers” earlier would’ve created massive confusion in movie audiences.
Sounds about right to me. I gave it 5/10 on IMDB. What should’ve been glorified was Spartan ideals, not war. War is just a means to ensure that the ideals get to survive.
Some of it was made up, of course, but it was made worse by the marginalization of Dilios. You have your big espouser and storyteller, USE him! Furthermore, he only tells stories when not in the heat of combat, adding a bit of realism.
This reminds me, actually, of the Hong Kong Initial D movie. What I wanted…what I prayed for…was that everyone involved would be totally lazy and stupid. That means that we’d lots of racing action, incredible stunts, spectacular wrecks, and thrilling wheel-to-wheel sprints to the line, and nothing else. You’re cheapo Hong Kong cinema, for crying out loud. It’s not going to be deep. It’s not going to be intelligent. ANY attempt to follow the source material will result in loud complaints from the hardcore fans. Knowing this, why even try to include a tedious, treacly, preachy romance/prostitution story, turn Bunta into a useless drunkard, turn Itsuki into a good-for-nothing parasite, etc.? Give us cars and mountains and racing, dammit, and we’ll walk away satisfied! That’s exactly the way I felt with 300. All the politics, feminizing, fancy dialogue, philosophy, they’re just an annoying distraction from bodes being sliced in half and panicked soldiers tumbling into the sea.
Actually the justice and freedom thing belongs in there. In Herodotus, following the murder of the Persian ambassador the Spartans send two of their own to Persia to act as a sacrafice to atone for what happened. On their journey the two Spartans stay as a guest in the home of someone who is friendly to them as well as a client of Persia. Their conversation goes something like this:
Persian Client: Why do you not give Darius what he wants? You can see that I live a comfortable life and you could also live a comfortable life.
Spartan: You have not tasted freedom and do not understand what it means to be free. We would be willing to do anything it takes to remain free for we could not bear to be slaves. We would even be willing to fight with axes if necessary.
Within the context of Spartan society all the “freedom” talk make sense. Just remember that they’re not exactly talking about freedom for most of the helots. Or even freedom in the sense that we think about it today.
Marc
Actually, I own that movie, and wanted to specifically recommend it. Sure, it contains plenty of hokiness, but also: it gives a clear sequence of the political and military events involved; the Spartans are played by soldiers, so they move well in formation; and there’s beautiful location filming on the Greek coast.
This movie was just made for poking fun at. See my comments in an earlier thread.:
“That’s not a hunchback…THAT’S a Hunchback!”
“Either the Spartan Elders are in TERRIFIC shape, or else Leonidas just likes taking the Hardd Way.”
“It’s convenient that they have a Bottomless Pit with no railing right behind where the Persian Ambassadors walk. It justifies the kid or two that accidentally falls in every year.”
–and so on. MAD did a great parody of this. So, apparently, did Rifftrax (I have to get this.)
But you can’t blame it all on the movie produiction team. He may not have had all the scimitar-handed Eunuch/Executioners and quadriplegic courtesans, but Miller’s Graphic Novel was itself crammed full of plenty of the overblown, over-the-top imagery that was so faithfully and lovingly transferred to the screen.
I didn’t read the comic book, but I dug the movie. I can see all the homo-eroticism in it, but it’s a guy movie.
I liked it. I wish I would have seen it in IMAX and I still would.
Now THAT I could get behind. That’s how people might have talked. Unfortunately, that’s not how they did talk in the movie. They were blabbing about Liberty in some freakish Anglo-Saxon vein, like Thomas Jefferson in leather hotpants.
Ironically, that’s such a small change, but it makes a big difference. Just saying, “We are free men, and we’re going to kick your butt if you come over here.” would have been fine. But they didn’t do that. They started talking about Freedom like modern Amnericans, and that just irritated me.
Edit to add: Basically, you could transplant their statements into any other movie: WWII, Revolution, Civil War, and it wouldn’t matter. That’s the problem here.
Oh god, yes. “This is…a SPARKplug”. “This is…PART of a BALANCED BREAKFAST!”
[Snicker]. Homoerotic movie. You said, “get behind.” [/Snicker]
Anyway, I saw the movie on DVD and found it boring. I really was excited about it and wanted to like it. I’m not sure what it is that made it so bad, but it just never clicked for me.
Given the Spartan propensity to put their young ones to physical tests, they’d probably just figure that the ones who fell in weren’t nimble and conscious enough to be Spartans.
