300

[SuAside]

Hell, we make entertainment about the Nazis now. Return to Castle Wolfenstein? Half of the appeal of the game was the badass looking Nazi outfits. Hey, their uniforms were designed by Hugo Boss. They might have been evil buggers, but they had style.

maybe, but you're not playing a nazi kicking allied ass are you?

(but yes, of course there are strat games where you can play Rommel & such)

 

[Jebus]

Is this movie about the Sacred Band, or is it a different period from Spartan history?

The Sacred Band was Thebean.

 

[Gekko]

We'll see how much fantasy and how much history this has. Im just worried, because I like history more than hollywood. Looks good though.

But my bet: they rape history.

And didn't they use phalanx already in that timeperiod? Or is 300 no enough to hold good phalanx?

 

[Malky]

It's not based specifically upon the historical event, so much as it is upon the mythology surrounding the event. Get over it, sheesh.

This looks like a beautiful and faithful translation of Miller's book. I'm excited.

 

[Gekko]

Im sorry. I just can get a bit fanatic when it comes to history. Im looking forward to this either way.

 

[Bradylama]

I still gotta choose a bunch of fascist assholes over women-hating pederasts.

This'll be the coolest movie of the season, guaranteed.

 

[KQX]

This movie is going to be a great one, mark my words.

This'll be the coolest movie of the season, guaranteed.

Great? Cool? Not strong enough words to describe the experience you'll have once you see this film in the theater. I just saw it at an IMAX and I was ready to get back in line and see it again. Incredible!

 

[Hellion]

"300" has been on cinemas here since Wednesday, and all cinemas in my city have pre-sold all tickets to it up until next week. I should have reserved a seat earlier...

 

[Hermisky]

how about ' Breakback Mountain 2 : the Spartiates ' ?

 

[victor]

Yeah, it seems a little homoerotic.

 

[KQX]

Oh that's just a bonus. Xerxes is faaaabulous.

 

[SuAside]

Yeah, it seems a little homoerotic.

well, it's a movie about racist pedos. what did you expect?

 

[Cimmerian Nights]

We'll see how much fantasy and how much history this has. Im just worried, because I like history more than hollywood. Looks good though.

But my bet: they rape history.

And didn't they use phalanx already in that timeperiod? Or is 300 no enough to hold good phalanx?

Dude it's Frank Miller's 300, not Herodotus'.

 

[Tannhauser]

You can always count on Stephen Hunter. Agree with him or not, he is a wonderful bastard of a newspaper movie critic.

'300': A Losing Battle in More Ways Than 1
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 9, 2007; Page C01

Go tell the Spartans that their sacrifice was not in vain; their long day's fight under the cooling shade of a million falling arrows safeguarded the West and guaranteed, all these years later, the right of idiots to make rotten movies about them.

The story has been told and will be told again as long as there are tellers and listeners, because most people get it. Even kids get it. But "300" -- the new cartoonified version of the hard day's work at the Hot Gates on the coast of Greece, where 300 stood against a million-man march of Persians--is clueless.

The theory of Spartan greatness argues that the Spartans bought time with blood, and allowed the other Greek city-state armies to slip away and fight another day and eventually triumph. Thus this frail bloom we call Western civilization continued to survive in the rocky Attic soil. And thus we speak English, not Farsi, and trace our government back to a neighbor of Sparta's. The argument also dramatizes a continuing reality in democratic societies that, while it's nice to have Athenians around to invent government and theater and the sandal, every once in a while it's necessary to dig up some Spartans to get in real close and bayonet the bad guys right smack in the guts.

"300," alas and to its shame, makes no argument at all. It's entirely an overblown visual document with an IQ in the lower 20s. It doesn't even bother to mention the strategic context of the Battle of Thermopylae or to follow the story through to its end at Salamis, where the Athenians sent the Persian minions to meet Mr. Jones at the bottom of the Aegean, and drove the Persian Big Boy Xerxes back to his harem where he ultimately perished on an intriguer's knife. Meanwhile, the Greeks went on to invent the rest of history.

Instead, we get a Spartan culture that seems notable primarily for one thing: the invention of the ab machine. You never saw so many six-packs in one place outside of a Budweiser warehouse! So the movie isn't set in history or in time but in some dank, feverish swamp of the imagination that betrays its comic book origins (it's based on the graphic novel by "Sin City's" Frank Miller). Some of the problem is a result of the technical: Like Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City," the movie is one of those computer-painted jobs, in which real men do real stuff in a big blue room, and then digital artists invent a world around them, which can be manipulated, tweaked and turned to infinite perversity. Who can care about history when you can spend a hundred hours tuning a geyser of Persian blood until it resembles a tulip opening on Mars?

There's also trouble in the staging: The action is all showy and stylized, never quite realistic, in a kind of van-art gray-brown patina. The director, Zack Snyder, hasn't a gift for kinetic action and the battle choreography is stilted. He overdoes the slow-mo until it becomes comic and the whole package aestheticizes violence, leaching its meaning, distancing us. There's nothing like the horror of the close-in stuff in "The Seven Samurai" or "Zulu," to name two great battle movies.

Anyway, the film begins with -- and ends with, and uses pretty much as a one-man band -- Leonidas, the king, played by brawny Scotsman Gerard Butler, who has enough charisma to pull it off. (He's a lot better than Richard Egan in 1962's campy "The 300 Spartans," I'll tell you.) He bellows and struts and declaims -- he once played Attila! -- and he looks good in spandex and velvet.

After establishing Leonidas as a stud among studs (he looks like he's got a seven-pack!), the movie gets to its setup: the arrival of Persian emissaries to warn the Spartans to give up or face annihilation. The movie plays it one-on-one, Sparta vs. Persia to the death, and the Spartans make the gathering storm inevitable by kicking the Persian emissaries down a well. So much for diplomatic immunity.

In Snyder's conceit, the Persians represent effeminate decadence. Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) looks like Geoffrey Holder in a photo by Helmut Newton. There's an androgynous quality to all of them, as if their secret mission is to blur the sexes and turn the Spartan studs into women; it's unsettling and undoubtedly effective, though it would probably bring a smile to Ann Coulter's lips.

As for the masculine Spartans, they could be NFL wide receivers. But . . . oh, endless, fascinating coils of life! -- they're also kind of gay. The movie has an unmistakable homoerotic undercurrent, ripe as the smell of sweat in a locker room. All those hard Nautilus-tortured bodies, gleaming, greasy, smeared with blood, those sinewy arms, the vein patterns, as the camera notices things about the male body that John Ford would find scandalous.

Quickly enough, Snyder gets us to the action. The Persians land on a Greek beach a million strong but the only way to the heartland is through a narrow pass. That is where they will run into Spartan bronze. In the tight confines of the pass, when the men are face to face, it's pretty equal. Only 300 Persians at a time are able to try the Spartan line, so we get war as Ohio State football; three yards and a cloud of blood.

Meanwhile, and for reasons not historical but purely dramatic, the script cuts back to the capital, where Leonidas's wife, Gorgo (Lena Headey), is holding the fort against cut-and-runners led by leering Theron (Dominic West of "The Wire"). The politics here are strictly BYO: Are the cut-and-runners Democrats betraying Leonidas-Bush as he fights the scum of the East, or are they moderate Muslims betraying Leonidas-Osama as he fights the scum of the West? You get to make that call.

But a bigger question remains, and that's why? Why this movie? It's kind of a ghastly hoot, but it flees from history and it mocks men who gave so much, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness. I just think some moments, when history turned on guts and bronze, deserve more than a comic book.

 

[Bisonman80]

Does that reviewer know that its not based on the historical events, but on a fucking comic book? I mean gee, I thought I was wanting to be entertained not given a history lecture.

I'm all for historical accuracy, but this movie isn't even TRYING to appear to be historically accurate. Its an entertaining action movie that is based on a comic book that HAPPENS to be based on a historical event.

 

[Tannhauser]

So the movie isn't set in history or in time but in some dank, feverish swamp of the imagination that betrays its comic book origins (it's based on the graphic novel by "Sin City's" Frank Miller).

I dare say he does. Stephen Hunter actually reads graphic novels, I believe Lone Wolf and Cub is one of his favorites.

 

[DirtyDreamDesigner]

I dare say he does. Stephen Hunter actually reads graphic novels, I believe Lone Wolf and Cub is one of his favorites.

Doesn't change the fact that most of his comments are utterly moronic.

 

[John Uskglass]

I liked it, but the review is accurate nonetheless.

Long ago there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amidst copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly buffness, and yet these were men of action and honor, not "philosophers and boy lovers" like their namby-pamby rivals the Athenians.

Lunatic machismo was cultivated early. From the age of seven, Spartan boys were trained in the art of humorlessness, and made to beat each other into submission. Little is known of the Spartan women, but scholars assume they were fierce.

Spartans were men of few words. They spoke in a language composed almost entirely of monosyllabic stupidities. In that strange time, among those strange people, a voice rang out perpetually from the heavens. No one knows who spoke it, but historians agree that this holy text was silly and repetitive and devoted by and large to what they now term "the totally butch awesomeness" of Spartan deed. History remembers their ethos: "Only the hard and strong may call himself Spartan. Only the hard. The strong." It remembers their war cry: "For honor's sake, for duty's sake, for glory's sake, we march. We march." And the immortal words of their fateful end: "We are undone! Undone, I tell you!"

Such magnificent verbiage was memorialized by Frank Miller, and incorporated into the text of 300, his graphic novel retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, in which the titular quantity of Spartan studs fended off a billion gazillion Persian invaders. Marshalling the full resources of high-end computer imaging and the full capacities of hardcore fanboy nerditude, writer-director Zack Snyder (he of the unexpectedly decent Dawn of the Dead remake) has now brought Miller's book to "life."

Slathering pancake make-up on its actors then pasting them into digital backgrounds, 300 takes the synthetic blockbuster one step closer to total animation; its bland, weightless monochromatics make Sin City look like the grungiest neo-realism. It's a ponderous, plodding, visually dull picture, but the blame shouldn't be put on Snyder's skills per se, and has nothing to do with his ambition to blur the distinction between CGI and photography. Frankly, it's the slavish, frame-by-frame devotion to Miller's source material that's the problem. That explains both the risible screenplay and why the movie, for all its liberation from the real world, never takes full-winged flight into its own peculiar universe. Bogged down by respect for Miller's medium—he's almost as faithful to 300 as Gus Van Sant was to Psycho—Snyder seems to have forgotten that where comic-book panels indicate movement, movies can actually move.

The exception to the rule of inertia comes fitfully in certain action scenes, of which there are enough to satisfy the action-buff bloodlust the film seeks to aggravate and sate. Here and there, Snyder makes good use of the lesson of The Matrix, slowing the slices, dices, and decapitations to a digitally-calibrated crawl the better to relish all 360 degrees of their stupendous ass kickery. Tolerate the lobotomized dialogue and some half-assed political intrigues and you'll find a good 10 minutes of 300 worth posting on YouTube. You can never go wrong with rampaging battle elephants. Throw in a war-rhino, some silver-masked ninja magicians, and an 8-foot-tall godking who looks like RuPaul beyond the Thunderdome (Rodrigo Santoro as Xerxes) and 300 is not without its treats.

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.

On first glance, the terms couldn't be clearer: macho white guys vs. effeminate Orientals. Yet aside from the fact that Spartans come across as pinched, pinheaded gym bunnies, it's their flesh the movie worships. Not since Beau Travail has a phalanx of meatheads received such insistent ogling. As for the threat to peace, freedom, and democracy, that filthy Persian orgy looks way more fun than sitting around watching Spartans mope while their angry children slap each other around. At once homophobic and homoerotic, 300 is finally, and hilariously, just hysterical.

 

[KQX]

"300," alas and to its shame, makes no argument at all...It doesn't even bother to mention the strategic context of the Battle of Thermopylae...

The way I see it, the movie should get you interested in finding out what actually happened during and after the battle of Thermopylae. There are some relevant historic scenes that I would have loved to see in the context of the movie/comic book: Battle of Marathon, Persians crossing the Hellespont, the naval battles of Themistocles. They would have added to the historic significance of the event and I bet they could have been highly impressive visually. But then again, there’s only so much you can put into one movie. Ultimately, I think it works better with a narrower focus rather than striving to achieve a historical epic status. Don't watch this movie as a history lesson; watch it for its pure awesomeness.

The director, Zack Snyder, hasn't a gift for kinetic action and the battle choreography is stilted. He overdoes the slow-mo until it becomes comic and the whole package aestheticizes violence, leaching its meaning, distancing us.

I couldn’t disagree more! There have been countless movies that have haphazardly used the matrixy slow motion thing, but I’d say that in 300 it’s actually used incredibly well. The choreography is well thought out. In fact, the battle scenes do a good job of displaying some important aspects of Spartan combat tactics. You can clearly see the dominating effect of the superior Spartan spears, and when they break, the Spartans quickly and efficiently switch to the xiphos. We also see the advantage of the highly maneuverable and versatile Spartan shield (with the forearm loop and handle). And finally…phalanx FTW!

In Snyder's conceit, the Persians represent effeminate decadence.

Um OK, and they were also shown as technologically more advanced and in several situations much more reasonable and brighter than the Spartans.

they're [Spartans] also kind of gay.

Like, duh…

some silver-masked ninja magicians

Hehe, the Immortals did look a little too weird with Japanese-style masks and no shields. But they were shown as remaining completely silent during battle, which is one of the things what they were known for.

Another thing I’ve heard is that it was highly unlikely that the Persians used any cavalry or other animals for this particular battle. I’m sure Jebus will be happy to make a longer list of inaccuracies when he sees the movie.

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 LOLed, but with those observations, the reviewer has outgayed himself more so than the actual movie.

 

[Bisonman80]

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 LOLed, but with those observations, the reviewer has outgayed himself more so than the actual movie.

Its so true. It was their clothing, anybody who actually spends time scrutinizing their crotch guards needs to check themselves.

I dare say he does. Stephen Hunter actually reads graphic novels, I believe Lone Wolf and Cub is one of his favorites.

Doesn't change the fact that most of his comments are utterly moronic.

I realize its probably the guy's job to do these kinds of reviews, but come onnn. Not every movie needs to be analyzed down to the ink used to write the screenplay. The movie is entertaining and worth the average person's money, that's all a review needs to tell you. I don't know what kind of venue he writes for but unless its some kind of Film academy or something, the guy takes his job way too seriously.