I’m looking for historical movies about Ancient Greece, preferably in the classical period.
The problem is that it seems like every Greek movie automatically equals mythological fantasy. I see lists of movies for things like “Immortals,” various Hercules movies, “Clash of the Titans,” old and new, and so on. The only recent historical movies I’m aware of are “300” and its sequel, which are obviously pure nonsense and just as fictitious as anything involving Ray Harryhausen.
I am not aware of any Greek equivalent of “Rome” (the HBO series) in the sense of a no-nonsense look at historical Greece. The closest thing I’ve been able to find to a serious historical piece is 2004’s “Troy,” which is honestly kind of sad.
Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1981) are movies I remember watching and enjoying. Here’s Wikipedia’s page on films set in ancient Greece.
Minor hijack: I wouldn’t call HBO’s *Rome *“no-nonsense”. And I’m not complaining about the Pullo and Vorenus stuff this time. Some of those storylines are just horribly written, IMO. But that’s IMO.
I mean the historical stuff. A lot of it is wrong in ways that are just… weird. It’s like if someone decides to build a perfect replica of the Palace of Versailles. They do all the research, get all the original architectural plans, and build an excellent replica. Then, for no reason, they shuffle a bunch of the the rooms around, and then pick up half of the building and move it ten yards to one side. I mean… why? It’s just baffling.
LOL, yeah, I know what you mean. Don’t even get me started on shows about the Tudors! But my point is that they didn’t have any Gods or monsters walking around.
Isn’t a movie about Hercules one place where you *want *gods and monsters, though?
Although, of course, even if you have them, you can still stuff things up comprehensively. I recently read about Disney’s version of Hercules, and although I haven’t seen it, I’m not letting my hypothetical children anywhere near that.
BTW:
Despite all its gag-inducing offensiveness, its minimalist wardrobe choices, and its failure to give a damn about how phalanxes work, *300 *isn’t the worst movie you can show your children, I think. It’s pretty clearly basically a comic book movie, and, weird as it sounds, the history in it actually isn’t that bad. You can watch the movie, then take a college course about the Greco-Persian Wars, and you won’t feel lost.
This is probably mostly because the focus is on such a small episode, with so few moving parts, that they couldn’t actually find anything to completely screw up, but still. I’m actually surprised at how few complaints I have about the actual plot. I don’t think they break anything important. And besides, it’s not like Herodotus is the poster child for reliability to begin with. Some of the weirdness, like the Persian army being unrealistically ginormous, is already in the source material.
The sequel needs to be nuked from orbit, though. That one commits all the usual sins, and then invents a few new ones.
Um, what? The Macedonian-style phalangite wielding a sarissa longer than John Holmes’s privates was a later invention, if that’s what you’re thinking of. But this is the first time ever I’ve heard it suggested that you shouldn’t refer to a classical-era hoplite shield wall as a phalanx. It’s perfectly standard.
He is partially correct. The word “phalanx” was used to describe any army formation by writers like Xenophon, but did not come into common use for the tactical - level fighting unit until the age of Alexander. Modern historians retroactively applied it to all shield wall formations, even into the Classical period. Writers like Hanson, Matthew, and Kagan consistently use the word phalanx to describe a hoplite shield wall, even if the Greeks themselves did not always use that word.
No, he’s not even partially correct. There’s absolutely nothing weird, wrong or unusual about my above use of the word “phalanx”. Heck, it’s not like the word “phalanx” is obscure technical vocabulary. It’s the term any normal person would use to describe a hoplite shield wall in casual conversation.
Yeah, this is one of those issues that is not very clear cut. They very definitely thought of themselves as “free,” and the Greeks in general wanted free and independent polis. The Spartans did create institutions to balance the power of their kings. I would say the kind of rhetoric Leonidas uses in the movie very definitely reflects what real Greeks thought about their situation.
At the same time, of course, the Spartiates were few in number and tied down by their need to prevent slave revolts. I would say that they had a somewhat different definition of “freedom” than we do… But the early Americans saw no contradiction in talking about freedom while simultaneously keeping vast numbers of slaves. My understanding is that a Spartan would see no contradiction in talking about freedom for Spartiates but not helots…
The way I think about 300 is that it is a Spartiate telling a story to other Spartiates just before the battle of Platea begins. This is why the Persians are grotesque monsters, the characters are so bellicose, and the Spartan ideology is so hypersimplified. The story he tells is the equivalent of Henry V’s St Crispin’s day speech, in that it is meant to inspire and enrage the other warriors just before they attack.
The problem is that the average moviegoer probably didn’t realise the story was being told by an unreliable narrator, because the story completely ignored the real issues about Spartan society and the deep problems it caused them.