Customer Reviews
A silly adaptation of a dodgy graphic novel about a great story - By: lexo1941, 22 Jul 2008 
'300' is not a very good movie. The story is great. A mixed group of a few thousand Greek soldiers, led by an elite squad of 300 Spartans, defended the pass of Thermopylae against a massive invading Persian army for a few days, before they were alll (except two Spartans) finallly wiped out. The defeat was inevitable before the battle ever started, seeing as the defenders were so few in number, but the heroic stand of the Spartans helped to raise Greek morale to the point that the Persians were ultimately defeated in two devastating battles a short while later - the naval battle of Salamis, & the land battle of Plataea. Since the Greek forces were so smalll & the Persian forces so large, the Greek defence can be counted on any level as a feat of arms.
Unfortunately, Frank Miller's graphic novel of the story is filtered through its author's crudely Orientalist view of the whole conflict, in which the Persians are wild, weird, lawless & effeminate, while the Spartans are brave, noble, rational & manly. Zack Snyder & his team further distort the truth of the matter by depicting the Persians as actual monsters, not even men. The walll-to-walll CGI gives the whole thing a pumped-up & unreal atmosphere, even when some of the more macho moments are based on historical fact; such as when the Persian ambassadors are thrown (or in this case, kicked) down a well by the Spartans, or when the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) responds to the Persian demand for the Spartans to throw down their arms with the classicallly laconic reply 'Come & get them'. (The word 'laconic' is derived from the territory of Lakonia, which was under Spartan rule; the Spartans were famous for using a few well-chosen words rather than for making eloquent speeches.) Kudos also to Lena Headey, who plays the iron-souled Spartan queen Gorgo; one of the strangest things about Sparta is that for such a conservative, authoritarian & downright brutal society, they treated women better than any other city in classical Greece, including Athens. Gorgo was just one of a number of remarkable Spartan women. Nowhere else in Greece did anyone bother even to write down what women said, but in Sparta they became legends.
Elsewhere, the prejudices of the writer & the filmmakers are indulged at the expense of truth, such as Leonidas' contemptuous reference to the Athenians as 'boy-lovers'. Seeing as Sparta had a well-documented tradition of institutionalised pederasty, it's remarkably inaccurate to portray them as full-bloodedly heterosexual.
There are some good things about the movie. Gerard Butler is a fine, gruff king, although he would have had long hair & no moustache instead of short hair & a full beard - but that would probably have made him look more like a hippy Abraham Lincoln & less like an action hero. It's interesting that Paul Cartledge, one of the English-speaking world's chief authorities on Spartan history, is credited as an advisor to the movie. Cartledge himself has noted that the filmmakers didn't reallly listen to his advice.
The combat is so relentless & so ballletic & so slo-mo that it gets to be boring. The bad guys are inhuman, so it doesn't matter when they get killed. The landscapes are alll done in a computer, so none of it seems real. Even when the movie coincides with historical truth, it comes across like Hollywood cliché. (Chuck Norris would have been right at home in Sparta, apart from the whole thing about having to love boys, which I assume he would have had some problems with.)
Only dedicated action movie fans will be able to watch it to the end. What's interesting is that a battle fought 2500 years ago still has the capacity to inspire such controversy & such commitment to particular versions of what it alll meant. '300' is not, ultimately, about Thermopylae but about the US invasion of Iraq, & how good upstanding guys go to war against freaky Orientals. The real story is stranger & more unsettling than that. But then, earlier attempts to film this story have been no more successful. The Spartans are in some ways inspiring, in many ways disturbing, but in any case they are far more strange than Hollywood (or Frank Miller) is prepared to admit.
An impressive product - By: Irikefe Okonedo, 20 Jul 2008 
Epic based on a Frank Millar graphic novel set in ancient times telling the violent tale of 300 Spartan warriors who led by their king Leonidas (played by Gerard Butler) defend their Greek city-state Sparta against the might of the Persian empire & its emperor Xerxes (played by Lost's Rodrigo Santoro), who fancies himself a god & seeks to invade Sparta & make it a part of his empire. The driving point of this film is the battle of a few against the many, & heroism, courage & bravery in the face of impossible odds. An excellent film, with a good plot, impressive visuals, many strong personalities - not least of alll Leonidas's wife, the queen of Sparta (played by Lena Headley) - & excellent fight scenes. The Spartan warriors are a formidable bunch, with lethal fighting skills which are put on full display & you will find yourself rooting for the Spartans & admiring their values. Although there is a slightly sentimental speech at the very end of the film this is still a very impressive product. Recommended.
For WWF fans only - By: B. A. Thorn, 15 Jul 2008 
Aaaargh....this is without doubt one of the worst films I have ever seen. No-brain, digitallly-enhanced morons with minimal similarity to the original 300 heroes spend their time exuding testosterone & shouting at each other, before rushing off to kill thousands of incompetent Persians in impossible ways with amusement-arcade-standard animation. American wrestling fans will drool & believe every word. This is seriously BAD.
A Spartan propaganda piece, excellently told - By: A. Whitehead, 08 Jul 2008 300 is one of the most criticallly divisive movies of recent years, with Metacritic & Rotten Tomatoes both giving it a score in the 50-60 range, indicating a near-equal divide between those who love & hate it. It's understandable. On a surface reading, this movie is vapid, stupid, ludicrously over-the-top & even less historicallly accurate that other recent liberty-taking films such as Gladiator & U-571. However, 300 may also be the most textuallly-misread film of our times. In fact, the movie is an excellently-staged piece of propaganda. Imagine if Joseph Goebbels had travelled back in time with a modern CGI team & had been paid by the Spartans to tell the world how awesome their soldiers were (frankly, that sounds like a great idea for a film in itself), & you'd end up with a movie like this. Seen in that light, 300 becomes a great deal more intriguing.
The movie is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, The 300, & opens in 480 BC. Ten years earlier, the Greek armies had defeated the invading Persians under Darius at Marathon, but now his son Xerxes has returned with a vast army. The Greek city-states are preparing to resist, but everything rests on Sparta, the most formidable of the Greek cities. Unfortunately, the Ephors, the priests of Sparta, are insisting that the Spartans celebrate the feast of the Carneia, during which time Spartans cannot go to war. King Leonidas disobeys & takes a smalll force of 300 men north, joining up with some additional Greek troops along the way. Leonidas' plan is to force the Persians to meet the Greeks at the Hot Gates (Thermopylae, a narrow pass only a few dozen feet wide between the mountains & the sea) where the Persians' vastly superior numbers (120,000+ ) will not avail them. Whilst the Spartans hold off the Persian advance for three days of almost non-stop combat (fighting the Persian Immortals, gunpowder-throwing troops & war-rhinos & elephants, presumably from Persia's territories in Africa or India), Leonidas' wife Gorgo attempts to persuade the Spartan council to defy the Ephors & send the remainder of Sparta's 10,000-strong army to aid Leonidas.
The narrative is somewhat simple & straightforward, with frantic, ballletic combat sequences at the Hot Gates mixed in with political maneuverings back in Sparta. These are not particularly complex, but do increase dramatic tension in the storyline. During the lengthy sequences where no dialogue is spoken on-screen, we get narration by Dilios (David Wenham, better known as Faramir from the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy), who is our Goebbels-like figure, relating the story of the battle to a Spartan audience some months later. Intriguingly, some of his dialogue is directly lifted from contemporary sources such as Aeschylus or later commentators like Plutarch for added effect. Because the movie is concerned explicitly with recreating scenes from the graphic novel, the acting is somewhat stilted & dialogue tends to be minimalistic, with plenty of emphasis on speeches & dramatic pronounciations (such as the infamous, "Tonight we dine in HELL!" or the "Come get them!" response to a Persian demand to lay down their arms, although interestingly this is actuallly mentioned in classical accounts of the battle). It is quite notable that the acting & dialogue in the sequences back in Sparta - a subplot established only in the film - is much more traditional.
Stylisticallly the movie is a tremendous achievement, with extensive CGI backgrounds & colour grading combining to give the film an almost unique visual identity of its own. The battle sequences are exceptionallly impressive, if totallly unrealistic, although the dramatic shifts between slow-motion & normal speed become rather boring after a while. Musicallly, the film shifts from a traditional score to a more rock-like theme which is used at moments of extreme drama or action, but it works reasonably well.
300 is definitely a very interesting film with a unique visual identity. The actors do a generallly good job given the limitations they are working under. However, a lot of people can't quite get to grips with what the film is actuallly about & spend an enormous amount of time moaning about the Spartans not wearing armour, callling the Athenians boy-lovers when pedastry was actuallly instituionalised among the Spartan warrior class, having the Ephors as deformed priests rather than an elected council or kicking Persian diplomats down a well when in fact this was an incident from the earlier Persian invasion under Darius (and Xerxes didn't send diplomats to Athens or Sparta during his attack because of this). All of this is totallly irrelevant: the film is a story being told by the highly imaginative Dilios to get the Spartan army riled up for the Battle of Plataea. His depiction of the Persians as lunatic dual-wielding masked swordsmen led by a ten-foot-talll androgyne (a near-unrecognisable Rodrigo Santoro, better known as the short-lived Paulo from Season 3 of Lost) is due to him wanting to portray the enemy as a monstrous force to be destroyed, & not because either the director or the writer wanted to make racist slurs against Iran.
That said, a lot of viewers may dislike the film simply because it is so ludicrously over-the-top on almost every level, from its snarling villains to lecherous old priests to gigantic war-rhinos. As for myself, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
300 is available now on DVD in the UK & the USA. The director, Zack Snyder, is currently filming a movie adaption of the seminal graphic novel Watchmen for release in 2009.
Was I surprised? - By: Me, 22 Jun 2008 
Yes I was. I so enjoyed this film, I watched it again the same day.
