My biggest problem with the movie was that they leaned really heavily on the Hot Gates / phalanx exposition, and then ignored it:
“We will fight here, where there numbers will count for nothing!”
“Yes, Thermopylae, where three men stand abreast – we can stand there in a phalanx and defeat them!”
“A phalanx is how Spartans always win. Side by side, your shield covering your neighbor. We can fight them indefinitely if we stay in a phalanx.”
“Yes, brilliant! We’ll stand side by side at the hot gates, in a phalanx, which is how we fight, and then their numbers will count for nothing!”
“A phalanx you say? We should find somewhere that the terrain will support a phalanx. Like Thermopylae!”
Five minutes later, the Persians show up, and the Spartans charge willy-nilly out of the gates like Brad Pitt in Troy, and for the next two hours the Spartans fight one-on-one with Persians as the rest of the Persian army hangs back waiting their turn, like a bad kung fu flick. Near the end of the first charge, one of the Spartans in the first row of the phalanx throws his only spear at a charging enemy. So much for the phalanx! They do a scene about halfway through where one of the men “breaks ranks”, but you can’t really tell until they show a wide shot. A pretty good movie, overall, but very heavy-handed on the macho “Dulce et Decorum Est” stuff.
I saw the movie with a fellow Doper who will probably be along shortly to Pit the parents who brought four-year-olds to the movie. :eek: Those parents deserve to be on nightmare duty for a year.
Oh, I so agree. There was a group of little tweens that just wouldn’t shut up until I suggested that they do so…yeesh. All “Wow, bloody” and “Are they gonna do it?” and even “Aww, poor horses!”
It was a movie about some of the most hardcore badasses there’ve ever been. Gerald Butler’s been a favorite (he was the bomb in Phantom) and here he’s excellent, in my eyes. King Leonidias was a fellow you did not screw with. As a friend of mine said “You can’t fight crazy.” Lots of inspiring parts.
Lots of weirdo freaky people, though. What was THAT all about? Did the Persians like “oddities”?
I loved it. My husband and I got tickets earlier this week to make sure we could see it last night (opening night here). It’s one of the few movies we were equally excited to see, I would go see it again in the theater and it’s going to be a definite buy when released to DVD.
As an interesting aside, the director, Zack Snyder, is doing the movie version of Watchmen. He even snuck a hidden image of Rorschach into one of the trailers.
The visual style of 300 makes me optimistic about the Watchmen adapatation.
I loved it. I went with my girlfriend, who, in spite of being disinterested in muscley guys, warfare, or graphic novels, seemed really interested in seeing it
The very first battle seemed somewhat legitimate (I’ve never seen a phalanx operate in RL so I’m not sure here) but it seemed a very orgamized procession of Spartans who block, shove, stab, rinse, repeat.
Kimera, could you elaborate on what bothered you about the story? Did you read the graphic novel? The Persians were a huge empire. Sure they could have depicted the battle as being Spartans vs Greeks siding with the Persians, but the point of the story (Ahistorical as this aspect might be) is ‘free’ men prevailing over the enslaved. The whole emphasis on the persians looking African or Arabic or Mongol(?) (there were a couple of mongol-horde looking guys in there) was to emphasise that Persia was exotic and distant.
They make a lot of contrasts in the movie between Persia and Sparta. Much of the ‘Persia’ they protray is overeaggerated exoticism- people draped in gold, very sexualized costumes, omg piercings! etc. They are two very different forces not willing to yield to one another. Even the deformed mutant things shown in many scenes reflect this- note that in Sparta babies that are malformed are left for dead, only the strong survive.
Overall, I would say it is a good movie not because it is historically accurate (it wasn’t meant to be) but because I feel it is a good dramatization of an ancient story of an amazing battle. What I like about some ancient stories is how larger than life they become- its not totally history, but its not completely fiction, either.
I’ll dissent. After some reflection, I think it is a creative misfire. As wonderful as the visuals may be, they do not overcome the weakness of the creative vision and the internal illogic of the story.
Violence is treated uncritically and without nuance. The portrayal of the Persians is thoroughly conventional pablum. The writing was so poor that the only decent lines are actually from Herodotus (or Archilochus, re: returning with your shield or on it).
Perhaps the most galling element for me was the constant crowing about freedom and liberty. Unlike the Thespians, whose soldiers were clearly ordinary citizens, the Spartans had the “liberty” to train as full-time warriors since all of the labor was performed by enormous numbers of slaves. It is not clear why Spartan slavery should be preferably to Persian slavery.
The film missed another opportunity to treat the fact that the outcome at Thermopylae was only tangentially relevant to the prosecution of the war as a whole. Addressing the pointlessness and dare I say selfishness of the Spartan sacrifice would have made a much more challenging and interesting film.
Finally, the screed against mysticism at Plataea is equally nonsensical, considering the irrationality of Spartan law and the bizarre (and utterly fictional) treatment of the ephors.
Once all the stupid stuff is shaken out, there really isn’t a whole lot of substance left. I expect more out of comic books, and I certainly expect more out movies.
I rolled my eyes at the rhetoric about “freemen” as well, and I noted the lack of any mention of the Helots. I also noticed that a number of things were simplified and/or exaggerated, but I think you have to see the movie as a mythologized version of events. It’s not supposed to be a rendition of history but of legend. It’s a tall-tale, a highly idealized piece of Spartan propaganda. It’s not so much what happened in reality, but what got told around fireplaces afterwards. When taken on those terms, it’s very entertaining. When compared to history, there are obvious inaccuracies, ludicrous hyperboles, disingenuous rhetoric, caricatured foes, etc. When looked at just as an adventure story on it’s own terms, I think it works.
I would like to see a more realistic treatment of Thermopylae, though. Maybe Pressfield’s Gates of Fire will get made someday.
I didn’t see any Persians among the Persian army. Only one guy looked vaguely Persian (he was Egyptian) and he was in a minor role. What is the point of making the Persians look African/South American if not racial polarity? I think it would have been far more interesting to have shown the Persians as the way they are (“white” looking) in order to emphasize that it was the differences in societies that gave the Greeks the edge rather than any inherent advantage. Persia wasn’t that exotic or distance and the closeness of those empires allowed Greece to become what it was. The Persian and Egyptian love for skillfully crafted Greek pottery and sculptures enabled the Greeks to grow into a force to be reckoned with.
I also found the portrayed of the Persians as a bunch of genderqueer transsexuals unnecessary. There are members of Xerxes’ court who are listed in the IMBD as simply “transsexual” and the great king himself is nothing more than a prissy little drag queen. Did they make him tall because they were so stupid as to interpret art work of him literally? And if so, why does he look nothing like how he actually looked? The Greeks were portrayed as handsomely heterosexual (with unnecessary side comments about those “weak boy-lover” Athenians). They rightfully cast aside the ugly members of society, after all, look at what the ugly person who wasn’t killed at birth did.
This movie takes two complex cultures who both had positives and negatives and turns them into black and white issues, including several that didn’t exist in the historical battle. For example, as Maeglin notes, the Spartans had a lot of slaves. They had so many that they were in constant fear of a slave revolts (which only happened in Sparta afaik). There were three classes in Sparta. The Spartans, who were military professionals and were able to vote. Tthe “Perioeci” were freemen who composed the artisans, craftsman, merchants. etc who could not vote. And the Helots, who were descended from the people Sparta had subjugated and were treated as slaves. Bands of young Spartan men roamed around and killed any helot who was thought to just be thinking of revolt. Athenians were far more democratic than the Spartans. The Persians also had a very complex society and to portray them as effeminate monsters in a time when there is already a lot of racial prejudice against them does them a great deal of disservice. In full honesty, I saw this movie with 10 Persian friend and acquaintances so I was probably more aware of racial sensitivity when watching it than the average person.
I assume that most of these annoyances originally happened in the graphic novel. I held off on reading it because I find it difficult to enjoy movies if I have seen the comics first but I intend to go read it now.
I did enjoy the beefcake, but the other aspects annoyed me far too much that I don’t intend to see it ever again.
The whole idea of the Spartans championing freedom drew a raised eyebrow from me. But then I considered that for the Greeks “freedom” meant the freedom of their individual city-states, not individuals.
The lead actor did a great job. His accent kept creeping in, but the accents were all over the map in this film, so I can’t really blame him individually. The battle scenes were clear and unflinching compared to most modern movies. I absolutely despise action scenes that are so fast-paced and fragmented that it’s impossible to tell what’s going on, and I applaud this movie for not doing that. The aesthetic was great; apart from a few early scenes with some very weird lighting, I did not feel like I was watching a green screen. The fantasy elements were great; giant Xerxes, mutants, etc. These were important to me because they screamed, “We are not trying to make a historical epic! This is stylized fiction!” The historical references: “We will fight in the shade,” “come home with your shield or on it,” etc.
What I didn’t like:
The speeches were my #1 complaint. Been there done that, and it’s been annoying for awhile. I’m sick of epic, inspiring pre-battle speeches in movies. From now on they should shout Rape the fuckers! and get on with it. The guy whose son died, making the big display of not having told him he was his favorite: lame and predictable, and added nothing. The plot back home got a little bit too heavy; I could’ve done without several of the Queen & Trader scenes. The 300’s last stand felt rushed: it was like they thought “ok, this is the part of the script where they need to die so, bang, they’re dead.” The accents were all over the place. The ending was taken right out of Braveheart. The “Remember us!” theme was done in Troy, and I didn’t like it in that movie either.
Overall, 7/10. Good but not great.
I have a couple of questions to add, too:
-Was Faramir narrating the whole time? My wife said he was but if so, that was completely lost on me.
-What did Leonidas’s comment to Igor right before he threw the spear at Xerxes mean? At first I thought he was revealing that Igor was a double-agent but that obviously turned out not to be the case so it left me confused.
Since the highest Spartan ideal was to die in glory for Sparta, wishing immortality on a guy who wanted nothing more than to be accepted was telling him “You’re nothing like us and a betrayal of everything we are.” Basically it was the worst insult he could think of to a Spartan. I felt sorry for the hunchback. Talk about being screwed by society.
It was a story by Frank Miller. He writes* exciting, bloody stuff about scary people. Plot? Kinda along for the ride. I agree that the stuff with the queen was eh, but they had to have something in there. Blame Frank.
*Yes, I’m aware that it was an actual event. It was just Millerized.
Well that settles the question of whether or not I’ll take my 7 year-old as part of our homeschool experience on the Greek wars.
Perhaps by the time we revisit this time in history (4 more years) the more historically-accurate, version will have been made and he’ll be up to handle the realistic gore of war.
That’s what I took from it. This was a tale about a heroic battle. It’s really no different than similarly exaggerated bible stories. I leave it to the History Channel for the “real” textbook versions of things. This was eye candy.
I thought they did a good job of making it clear that for instance magic wasn’t real, but would have seemed real to them and to the teller of this story, as he recounted it.
The parts with the queen were kinda meh, but probably had to be there. They set up the ending, but felt a bit forced in. The only time the theater erupted in clapping and cheering was when the queen took care of her tough, take no shit queenly business. It was like the audience needed that scene, to offset all the manly man stuff.
I found an obsessed fan who did comparisons between scenes from the comic and screen shots from the movie trailers. It’s kinda cool. You can view them here.
