I never saw or heard of the comic. I did know of the famous battle and Xerxes.
I did not enjoy the movie. I disliked the portrayal of the Persians and Xerxes. None of this made sense. I disliked many of the battle scenes. The Spartan weapons could slice through bone and keep slicing? I was suppose to believe this crap? There is suspension of disbelief and then there is over the top BS that trashes a great mostly historic battle beyond hope.
The visuals were good, the plot and acting were very bad. It could have been a great movie.
I take your point. It is difficult for me to enjoy it even viewing it as a straightforward propaganda piece because I just can’t sympathize with either side. I might feel differently if I felt that the film intentionally subverted its own message. The movie wanted me to love the heroes so badly that I could not help but be a little repulsed.
I am not really worried about accuracy. It didn’t bother me that the Thespians did not really retreat, or that the ephors weren’t really demented priests. What bothered me is that even as an adventure story on its own terms, it lacked substance and was very difficult for me to enjoy.
Sorry, it gets a little fuzzy when the fantasy is directly based on a well known legendary story that did not include Vorpal Swords and Xerxes the effeminate, petulant moron. I guess this was just not for me.
I thought Xerxes was awesome. He was alarmingly good looking and his voice was hypnotic. Was that the actor’s real voice? He should read for audio books.
A quick check on IMDB reveals he’s Rodrigo Santoro, the guy who plays Paulo on Lost.
I saw it with my son tonight. We liked it–corniness and all. 7/8 out of 10.
I just have to quote a bit from the Village Voice review. This really cracked me up:
“Delicacies of dismemberment aside, 300 is notable for its outrageous sexual confusion. Here stands the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and his 299 buddies in nothing but leather man-panties and oiled torsos, clutching a variety of phalluses they seek to thrust in the bodies of their foes by trapping them in a small, rectum-like mountain passage called the “gates of hell(o!)” Yonder rises the Persian menace, led by the slinky, mascara’d Xerxes. When he’s not flaring his nostrils at Leonidas and demanding he kneel down before his, uh, majesty, this flamboyantly pierced crypto-transsexual lounges on chinchilla throw pillows amidst a rump-shaking orgy of disfigured lesbians.”
I know Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas. We haven’t seen the movie yet, but when we see him in the trailer, bth of us simply can’t see the same actor who starred in “Dear Frankie.”
Now, if it’s got dialog better than Dirty Dancing, it will have everything!
“Nobody puts Xerxes in a corner.”
That’s a pretty funny review. That review, and the comments in this thread (both pro and con) have pretty much confirmed my decision not to bother with this film.
Well I’m sure you’re okay with whether your son turns out gay or not. But if I were you, I wouldn’t read him reviews written by those bitter jealous old queens at the Village Voice. YMMV.
*“How come that Gerard gets to wear leather speedos and mascara and get away with it, that bitch! Just wait 'til I review his stupid movie!”
*
I saw this last night. I agree with most here–beautiful to look at, but not much substance. About what I expected, having read the comics, so I was not disappointed. I really enjoyed the spectacle of it all. The faithfullness to the look of the comic book is amazing.
Funny comment I heard on the way out: As we were leaving the theater, a woman turned to her husband and said, “I get to pick the next FIVE movies.”
Loved it. I knew it was historically inaccurate, even if I didn’t know exactly how, but I loved it nonetheless. I agree with whoever above said that this was the story of the battle that Dilios (David Wenham/Faramir) would’ve told to his troops, with all the magic and heroism and glorious battles and noble self-sacrifice.
When we were driving home, my husband asked, “Did you get your fill of rippled abs?”
Yes. Yes, I did.
Egyptians look very different from the Africans presented in this movie. Egypt was also a very tiny tip of the Persian empire which was mostly stretched out through the middle east. It seems highly unlikely to me that they would end up with so many Middle and South Africans working for them when they had so many other areas to chose from. What’s more, in this movie not a single general nor Xerxes was Persian. I don’t think they had any Persians in the cast.
Here is what Xerxes and most of his generals should have looked like. An interesting article that talks more Frank Miller can be found here.
I spent a good portion of the Xerxes scenes trying to figure out if he was played by Marco Leonardi, who was in Like Water for Chocolate and Cinema Paradiso.
I watch Lost but didn’t recognize Rodrigo. I’m pretty sure his voice was heavily manipulated, though.
Wow! A lot of people really wanted to see 300 this weekend.
My husband and I liked it a lot. We ended up not being able to go to the midnight show, and we had already made Friday night movie plans, so we went to the Saturday 3:15pm show. We got tickets just in time because it was sold out a few minutes later, in the multiplex’s largest theater. There were already lines for the next showings. We were running late and so had to sit way over to the side, so we’ll see it again where we can sit in our normal 4 rows back, dead center seats.
I didn’t know anything about the battle before going in, but I knew that it was based on fact. I didn’t expect the movie to be 100% historically accurate, but it gave us a base to build knowledge from. In fact when we got home we each sat down at our own computer (yes, we have our own computers, we could never share) and looked up information about the battle and spent the next couple of hours reading about it. Thank you to CJJ* for the Wikipedia link on the first page of this thread. That’s where I started. If anything, reading about it and some of the offshoot war links made me feel better about our world today. Yes, there are wars going on, but a) not anywhere near what there used to be. People don’t take war for granted nowadays, and b) there’s a long, (in)glorious history of assholes who waged war just because they’re jerks, and few people back then dared to raise a protest. At least nowadays one can protest unjust wars and idiot rulers and (generally) not get our heads whacked off for it.
Gerard Butler! What a great badass he was! I didn’t realize until it was over that that guy was the wimpy wuss from Phantom of the Opera! I take back all the negative things I’ve said about him and focus even more ire on Joel Schumacher and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
300 was beautiful to look at, and awe-inspiring to contemplate what might have really happened there. Again, I don’t care about it being historically accurate. I too agree that it was the story told from Faramir’s point of view.
One of the tactics used in the movie that I thought was a good idea but not followed through on, was the piling up of bodies. It was done mainly so that the Spartans could push the wall of bodies over onto the Persian warriors, but I don’t know why they didn’t just leave it like that. Imagine how demoralizing it would have been for the Persians to have to climb up over their dead comrades only to be picked off as they reached the top and tumbled down the other side, making the mound of bodies even bigger. And why that even crossed my mind when I’m a peace-loving pacifist in real life is beyond me.
Yeah, but people carved in stone can’t emote, and having to see Xerxes only in profile would be distracting.
I loved it for what it was, a fantastical vision of one of the most testosterone-laden moments in Western history. I also think that the imagery we see is the result of Faramir’s description of the battle as a pre-battle oration, sort of propaganda-within-sausagefest, and intend to watch it again as a commentary on the promotion of war and the necessity of propaganda as a tool of real politik. I’m looking back and thinking there’s more depth to it than the armchair-warrior-jerkfest reviews it’s been getting from some of the more sensitive critics.
You liked his digital voice? I saw 300 on Saturday and almost the entire audience groaned when he spoke and giggled because it sounded so silly. I could hear the eyes of everyone around me rolling so hard their irises were scraping their palates. Rather than coming across as some kind of tyrannical king, he looked more like a bitchy drag queen on a really bad day. (That and the putty from his fake facial piercings was really distracting.)
I’d be repeating a lot of the issues people have put forth about the embellishment of historical facts, but it can’t be restated enough to those who see these as detractors from the film that it is an impressionistic, stylized, high concept tale of fantasy, not a historical period piece. When storytellers of old would relate tales to people before film, or television, or even radio plays, it likely wasn’t uncommon for the tales to be great exaggerations. Animals were great beasts unlike anything people had ever seen, the bad guys were over-the-top caricatures and oddities of an otherworldly nature, and heroes of war could perform godlike feats of strength and agility. This story comes from a time where mythology and history were very nearly birthed from the same loins, as Spartan leaders themselves claimed to be descended from the gods, and perhaps rightfully so. These sorts of details were meant to be embellished for the sake of entertainment, and if you don’t realize this then maybe you’re not as much of a history buff as you think you are, otherwise you’d be able to forgive its misgivings, eat your popcorn, and just appreciate it for what it is.
All that being said, I liked it. It had problems just like any action film and could have done with less of certain things and more of other things.
The gratuitous bloodletting was cute, for a few minutes … it got to be a little silly after awhile because it was one of the lesser quality effects in the film and looked fake in many shots. It started to resemble blood spattering effects from a video game before long and could’ve been toned down just a little.
I wanted to see the enormous Persian executioner monster in battle. He wouldn’t have made much of a fighter, but he reminded me of one of those abomination zombies from WarCraft 3.
The parallel subplot about Queen Gorgo and Theron could’ve been paced better.
Interestingly, I went with a friend of mine, his girlfriend, and her 12 year-old son who’s pretty cool and could handle movies like this. They’d all seen Sin City (including the kid) so I assumed everyone knew what to expect. The only thing I expected her to get uncomfortable with was nudity, but even that was very artistically done and not just for gratuity’s sake. After all, everyone’s essentially half naked in the film to begin with, and uh, an appreciation of the human form (exemplary male examples in particular) is obviously a focus in this movie. And unlike Sin City, there were no immoral values or foul language, and this was a story based on actual history rather than gritty, violent fiction. Regardless, she ended up leaving the theater with her son a little more than halfway through the movie and I asked my buddy if it was the wrong idea to bring them. Turns out it wasn’t the revisionist history (which she admits to not knowing anything about in the first place) or the nudity that she took issue with, just the bloodletting. Even I sort of agreed to an extent, but uh, has anyone [or does anyone know of someone who has] walked out of this movie because it was too gory? I’d say as a general rule that if you don’t want to see a bloody movie, don’t go to a movie where the title is scrawled out in blood.
I asked if she’d walked out of a film like Braveheart as well, and she told me no, but that was because it was based on real events. I decided not to engage in a debate over logic that warped. :rolleyes:
