Wow. That’s ahistorical. The Spartans (and their Thespian reserve, which was about 700 men) were wiped out to the last man. Their sacrifice gave Athens time to deploy their navy, which subsequently destroyed the Persian navy at the battle of Salamis.
Also the “We will fight in the shade” is an actual historical quote (as I see Alessan has pointed out. Fantastic real-life one-liner.
Also of note is Leonidas’s famous one-liner. When instructed by Xerxes that the Spartans should lay down their arms, Leonidas famously replied, “Come take them,” a line that has been used to greater or lesser effect in action movies since the beginning of the genre (most recently and badly, of course, in The Fellowship of the Ring.
From what I’ve seen in Trailers, there’s a lot of slo-mo in the movie… Not just battle slo-mo, but walking from a to b slo-mo. Does it get grating, or repetitive?
There were a lot of slo-mo, enough for me to mentally comment on it. There were times when you just want them to get on with it. It’s not that the slo-mo scenes are very long, it’s that they happen fairly often.
“I liked Titanic , but why’d they have to make it so sad?”
I am super excited to see this movie, but very disappointed that none of the IMAX theaters in Iowa are getting it. Happy Feet: the IMAX experience can kiss my ass.
Is there anything besides fighting and chest-beating to this movie? Is there any backstory so we can give a flip about who gets killed? It LOOKS fantastic, but if it’s just CGI-enhanced equivalent of a wrasslin’ match, I think I’ll pass.
Don’t look at it that way. Look at it as if it were a comic book come to life…which is exactly what it is. Aside from the fantasy elements, I understand that Miller’s version of Thermopylae is quite accurate.
The actual, real-life event was so extreme that what actually happened would strongly resemble a blown-out-of-proportion Hollywood movie.
I’ve been excited about this for a while. It opens in Chicago on Friday but River East 21 is having a midnight showing Thursday night/Friday morning. We’ll be there.
In the movie, the Thespians are there, but they retreat on the final day. According to the Wikipedia site, 700 Thespians stayed behind. So there’s some artistic license taken.
I noticed in a trailer another line that I’d heard previously in a movie: Leonidas says something like, “Before this battle is over, the world will know that few stood against many.” Conan said something similar in his prayer to Crom in Conan the Barbarian. “All that matters is that two stood against many.”
I’m bumping this thread to note that the review for this film, The 300, which appeared in the Village Voice is so hilarious I did not want anyone to miss it:
It finally opened today in Bangkok, but only one or two shows late at night. That’s the way it often is at first, then after a week or two, it will be shown during regular times. They did that with “The Queen,” which just got bumped up into the regular times.
