Not till now, no.
Exactly. *Hero * was little more than an arthouse propaganda piece justifying China’s totalitarian government. Gorgeous, but chilling, and about as complex as your standard Worker’s Opera of Mao’s era.
Of course. I am just trying to make it clear that while I do think Hitler would have liked 300, I am not trying at all to imply that people that like 300 are like Hitler. You watch the movie and you think we need more people like the Spartans around and a lot less people like the Persians.
Good point. I saw it in D&D terms. In the end, the hero chose law over chaos, but it wasn’t an easy choice to make, nor obviously right.
Me too! I was all, “Hey! I don’t remember the fascist content in that movie … of course, all I do remember is basically ‘Geena Davis … mmmmmmmmmmm.’”
Haw! A far superior film; an overlooked gem.
In 300, it is the Spartans very practice of eugenics that causes their downfall. A deformed child, that would have been killed by Spartan law is spirited away by his parents. Then when he returns and offers to fight along side the Spartans he is refused. Refused for very good reasons, he isn’t trained in the Spartan fighting techniques and he really can’t do it. So, rejected by the Spartans, he goes to the Persians, shows them the secret path that allows them to get behind the 300.
I wouldn’t call that as saying eugenics is a good idea.
By the way, was it your intention to post this in the Pit? Or did you mean it to go in CS?
Well, except that by rejecting him, they were in fact *practicing * eugenics.
Damn my selective memory. All I remember is Dustin Hoffman saying, “Everybody thinks truth is like toilet paper, and they got a supply in the closet.” And when his son asks him, “What about all that you told me about always looking out for numero uno?” he admits, “I blew it.”
Well, the OP is a rant and I’m still expecting to have to defend myself against charges of kookery. possibly crack smoking.
Which leads to thier deaths.
I wouldn’t say that Hero is necessarily on the Qin’s side, though - it’s much more ambiguous than that. Sure, he “wins” in the end, but he’s not portrayed as terribly heroic. And Nameless’s choice was made with great difficulty, and the film ends without a definite endorsement of his final action.
Ah, but if they’d simply killed him–practicing eugenics properly–they might have triumphed! Their downfall was in their mercy.
Yeah, I can kind of see some fascist elements in the flick, though I’m not about to get too excited about it. I was also able to find Christian elements in Pleasantville. :dubious:
Right. Eugenics is properly seen as a bankrupt idea, but its practitioners don’t tend to see it that way.
How do you negotiate with someone who wants to take your country away from you and figures (whether rightly or wrongly) that they could do it easily by force? What would you bargain with?
Starship Troopers is approximately thirty-seven times better than 300.
I tried to do the calculation on the Riefenstahl piece but my wristwatch calculator doesn’t support scientific notation.
:dubious:
Bwah! I like your math.
When they were at the bargaining stage, the messenger only demanded a token amount of land. I wouldn’t seriously believe it would stop there, but I would have sent the messenger home with a firm ‘no’ instead of killing him and his entourage. Ah, but that would have robbed them of a chance to commit a manly act of murder while shouting out their catch phrase. Countries rattle their sabers at us all the time. Would you have us massacre their diplomats just so they don’t get to declare war first?