Movie Review The 300

Movie Review The 300

** ½
Rating; 2and a half Ninja stars


The swords ! Gasp ! the shields ! Swoon ! the bronzed pectoral muscles flex and sweat, Egad !
I decided to break with my frugal habits and see this movie on the big screen before the Chinese pirates wash all the color out. I’m glad I did the visuals are superb its a shame the rest didn’t follow suit
This movies has twisted through the cultural wasteland that is Hollywood and come back to us, once as a movie, once a comic book by the ghastly master Frank Miller. Once upon a time it may have even been a history about a tribe called the Spartans but after the entertainment machine has eaten its own dung so many times its difficult to be sure.
The true ancestor is not classical Greek history but Frank Miller’s own dreams and fantasies of the films he has seen. The look is very similar to the other screen version of this his comic book work "Sin City" which I enjoyed ( but not as much as the ground breaking comic.)
The story is solid enough and pretty straight forward. The Spartans are tough and cool, they have been invaded for no adequately explained reason by the Persians who are rich but decadent and possibly poofs.
Who can boil down a race and culture, classic heroes and massive wars to a few short minutes and show them true with only light and sound ? These guys certainly don’t and don’t even try.
I can buy the Armor plated Attack rhinoceros, I can even buy the Ancient magical hand grenades ( Lob’st now thine holy Hand Grenade ) but I cannot suspend my disbelief long enough or high enough to span the bizarre Persian King Xerexes and his hordes of mutants. The king himself appears to be 7 feet tall and a headline act for a Las Vegas night club, his servants are flabby freaks and his executioner appears to have cybernetic sword arms.
The rather weird spin on this movie has been the high geopolitical line taken by certain Iranian officials. With the amazingly successful global war on terror now into its 6th brilliant year some in Tehran are suspicious of Hollywood’s motives.
They need not worry Hollywood’s motives are what they have always been, purely mercenary. They are bagging Iran only in passing.
Miller is seeking out a sort of Death and Glory machismo that the Spartans seemed to have buckets of. The cold steel (or bronze) of combat especially against overwhelming odds is the antidote to the creeping plague of modernity. King Leonidas is hairy and virile he makes a point of not actually saying to his wife he loves her because he is so manly he doesn’t need to.
Hair appears to be a crucial marker of ones manliness and hence moral goodness in this pic. King Leonidas has the blackest beard but King Xerxes is bald, each of the Spartan soldiers can be measured in rank and coolness by the length and fullness of their whiskers. The Ephors for example, who are Spartan but corrupted priests have no facial hair at all, just plague boils and scrofula. The honest councilor has quite a respectable beard, trimmed a bit short but the evil traitor has an even shorter one.
The politics of the whole movie is far too mixed to be anything other than a mess, there is some talk of "freedom’ but it’s never explained.
The sad thing is that a real straight (no pun indented) telling of the story would have been much better. The real story is always tougher and harder but also better than anything even the most coked up Californian script doctor could ever invent.
In a straight retelling were the word Freedom is more than a cliché the brave Spartans would have some explaining to do about their own indigenous race of slaves, The Helots whom the Spartans would formally declare war on every year, giving the warriors citizens legal impunity to kill them as they pleased. As has been noted the passage to adulthood for a noble Spartan man would much more likely to be from murdering a helot farm hand than battling a dire wolf single handed.
A real dialogue between the Spartans and the Athenians would have been good to. They are referred to in passing as the "Philosophers and boy lovers" but you would have to go to ancient Sparta to get the real Greek institutional pederasty. We only really know of the Spartans through the Athenians, several frugal Athenian Philosophers idolized the tough Spartans but the Spartans themselves left us little. Their stories were told by others, like Frank Miller who would have been appalled if he actually had to live the Spartan life. History is written by the winners in this case the Athenians not the Spartans, Leonidas probably couldn’t even write.
Final verdict; 2 ½ Ninja stars, see it but don’t believe it