300

300(2007)

Review: 300 has been given lots of criticism. People like to view in the political way. That is not the way. Here's my take.

300 is an entertaining movie. This is all about the action and it's Spartans. The movie takes about the first 30 minutes to give us plot development before the Spartans take it to the battlefield.

The action is the key. The slow motion action is what really delivers. This is like a ballet of blood done so nicely. The action needless to say is satisfying. We are given lots of campy dialog and some good humor here and there that works. Gerard Butler is wonderful. He embodies the great king. Becomes him.

Now, on to the politics, 300 has it's own politics, but it was also based on a comic book written back in 1998. How can this be a pro-Bush statement? This is just like another Frank Miller picture, Sin City. The point is to make the comic book come to life. 300 was written by Frank Miller almost a decade ago and you think this is right-wing propaganda?

Listen to me. Take a deep breath and lighten up. Okay?

One last thing, this movie is NOT a history lesson. This is based on a graphic novel, similar to a movie made back in 1962, and is inspired by the battle in 480 B.C. This is not racist either.

The Last Word: 300 delivers what is was sent out to do. Action. Entertainment. Skin. Ignore the naysayers and enjoy. Excellent popcorn fun.

It seems that everyone who hated this movie must have written a review, so I thought I'd throw in my two cents to even things up a bit. First, if you assume every movie is made simply to uppercut some sort of ideology into the audience's chest, then yes, it does seem very racist, xenophobic, and the like. However, this film is based on a freakin' comic book! The Spartans were some of the most skilled, nastiest, nationalistic fighters out there, and certainly had reason to be more driven and nationalistic than Persia's, which was not an army of individuals fighting for their land and families. Should they have been portrayed differently simply to satisfy the current political climate? Are you mad? The cheesy one-liners are also evidence that this movie IS BASED ON A COMIC BOOK. The exaggerated characters is further evidence that this movie IS BASED ON A COMIC BOOK. This is not a historical movie, it is a movie which seeks to put a rockstar, no-holds-barred spin on a particular historical event. It isn't attempting to be accurate, or balanced, or anything of the sort, and it SHOULDN'T, because that isn't it's purpose. It shouldn't be obligated to do anything of the sort. It's ENTERTAINMENT. Nothing more. And it's damn good entertainment, in my opinion.

Every scene is beautifully crafted. I found the slowdown to be stylistic and much of the dialogue, which is apparently cheesy and fascist to everyone else, to be at least somewhat inspiring, and certainly engaging. These Spartans were trained their entire lives to be warriors, their entire culture is built around success in battle, and you don't expect them to be quite skilled, much more so than a slave army, and quite patriotic? Also, this movie was from the point of view of the Spartans. How would this army have appeared to the Spartans? Wouldn't their stories now be over-exaggerated, over-simplified, almost legendary? There isn't a great amount of character development because this movie is about a battle, ONE battle, THE battle for the continuance of the Western world, and yes, IF the Spartans had been simply overwhelmed from the start, and if their Athenian allies hadn't completely CRUSHED the much larger Persian navy at sea, the West simply could not have existed in any similar manner as it has. And yes, the Western world is guilty of arrogance, overextending it's boundaries to the point of imperialism, however, it has given our world a plethora of all-too-important philosophical ideals that are simply irreplaceable if we want to live in a free society.

I realize I spent a great deal of my time being critical of other reviews, so I would like to take the time to apologize for perhaps wasting the time of someone who was simply searching for a detailed point of view on the film. I can assure you that the film is action-packed. The scenes are absolutely beautiful, every one of them. The film is gory, but artistically gory, if that makes any sense. You'll know what I mean. The story is simple, direct, and inspiring. The acting is excellent. The movie, overall, was a tremendous experience. I give it a 9.

300 tells the story of the 300 Spartans who defended their homes against the Persian army. The movie is a phenomenal action packed story that sticks pretty close to the actual events. The movie is done in a style similar to a graphic novel which adds high contrast and beautiful slow motion scenes. Overall, the movie is incredibly entertaining and tells a fascinating story.

Really enjoyed it.

My only regret is I saw it at a non IMAX Cinema.

Don't get caught up in all the anti hype. Enjoy it for what it is which is a good tale, great action scenes, (if not a little over done), great war film acting and above all, a moral tale for today's age.

As for the historical angle and the comparison against the old film, try to enjoy this one as a modern updated version not unknown for its up to date (and cgi'd) feel.

Its the sort of film which made me want to find out about the Spartans and this particular period. Sad of me? Maybe, but I don't mind, it was great fun.

Enjoy, I certainly did.

The title refers to "the good friend" character who gives a memorial speech at the end, presenting the legacy that grows to fantastic proportions on its way to us as narrator whose words are from another planet. Presumably you as a viewer will make the association I did the with the demigods of Olympus, so artificial and childlike are the notions this narrator presents. They are so simple and extreme, these notions of how the world is abstracted through one eye..

It allows us to take a very few indicators and suppose a world. Deliberate deprivation of young boys is supposed to somehow instill valor. Flying blood droplets is supposed to somehow validate combat expertise. Tactical stubbornness leading to defeat is somehow celebrated, I suppose, coming very close to the 72 virgins bit. Yes, indeed, sometimes this slipped for me into the opposite of what it was intended to purify. The elixir of admiration for the west snapped to Zoroastrian soma more often than not.

That's because the history is that the Persians (the Achaemenids were actually Medes, more like Afghans are today) were the great world-builders of the era, creating less a totalitarian state than a federation of free states that flourished by trade not terror. And the Spartans were the thugs, the warlords who oppressed and terrorized their neighbors, building a state based on pillaged wealth. Even the Nazi association is reversed, the Medes were the Aryans, the Spartans essentially African, and no longer extant in today's Greece.

(Later, the Alexandran Macedonians, the Greeks of today, destroyed the by then corrupt and fragile Persian empire and all its great libraries and histories, torturing the collected scientists to death, in what has to have been the greatest and most brutal setbacks of civilization ever.)

So the resonances with today keep oscillating in a strange and stimulating dance between the intended admiration of these thugs we are meant to feel as the west, and those of Islam. But that "struggle" is over issues as remote from this as swimsuits are from locomotives. Let's even say vinyl padded speedos.

As a movie, the thing is oddly uneven. It's tied together by a consistent score, mixed of heavy metal and aeolian voices. And it does have a story, actually two; though simple, they span the thing and stitch pieces together. But there are distinct visual styles here, too many to integrate. I felt actually as if I were defending myself from some of them as they came at me just as the different components of the Persian army attacked the 300 hooting bodybuilders.

Its inevitable I suppose, when the computer work is so massive it has to be parsed out to creative teams distributed all over the world, and they have nothing better to go on than a comic book. I will admit that some of the these teams gave me great satisfaction, some of them in the actual battle scenes where the speed-shifts worked to emphasize the mapping of comic panels into reality. This, if you follow such things, was developed by Peter Weir in "Gallipoli," starring a then new Mel Gibson. Mel then sorta borrowed them for his own battle epic, including the early scene where he lops off a head. Here we emphasize the flying bodies, body parts and blood which quite literally become architectural. In fact there are three distinct architectural structures here made of bodies, and many others large and small made of living men.

For me the center of the thing is the early scene where the oracle is consulted. Three bits of background.

— when I see this plot device early in a movie, someone with a vision (or dream or hallucination) I tend to see the rest of the movie as what's in that vision. In other words here, when this girl reports what she sees in the future, the report is the movie that follows, and that we see through her eyes. It works for me because then I can ascribe the limits of the vision I see to the character I know shaped it.

— one of my most valued movie experiences is a very early short film. Shucks I see my comment on it here at IMDb is deleted. (If anyone saved it, please send it to me.) Its a dancer with flowing garments that sail with her in space. Over this has been hand painted color that overlaps the boundaries of the fabric, the first spatial artificial effect in film. Its transporting, this century-old image. Its copied in many ways here with the oracle's appearance. She's a drugged young beauty, and they use this as an excuse to have her dance, with smoke, hair, skin and fabric tendrils weaving space, sex, sense, vision. The designers of this scene were used nowhere else that I could tell. Its an extraordinary bit of art.

— There's something inherently cinematic about redheads. All filmmakers know this. Its in many how-to shortcut books. But like other fundamentals, no matter how hackneyed it gets, it can still be effective. In a film of actors whose hair has been blacked to seem Greek (and elsewhere skin darkened to seem "Persian"), they find an Irish girl to play the oracle. I guess she's pretty; it's hard to tell because she's less a person than the provider of hair and a nipple in a complex assembly, but there you have the redhead, first seen doing a Gilda hair introduction.

I saw this in a theater with a friend and despite dangerous political twinges we got swept up in it, together with the people in the auditorium. I think there's an analogy between the brotherhood of the men we see, and the implied brotherhood of the people in the audience. It brought us closer through vision. Film can do a lot worse.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.