300

[Mirc]

I haven't heard about this movie. I guess "300" is meant to represent the number of Greeks who fought at Thermopylae, right?

 

[Taliesin]

Well sure, it could be entertaining and interesting in the same way that Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation are. The obvious worry, though, is that it will have a political effect, if feckless teenagers and testosterone-poisoned men identify with the Spartans. The timing of the movie is convenient for those who would wish to whip up public support for war with Iran.

 

[theimmortal1]

300 is the amount of Spartan super warriors that fought. There were apparently many other fighters, just not of the Spartan mega ass kicking variety.

But either way Greece was badly outnumbered.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

Well sure, it could be entertaining and interesting in the same way that Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation are. The obvious worry, though, is that it will have a political effect, if feckless teenagers and testosterone-poisoned men identify with the Spartans. The timing of the movie is convenient for those who would wish to whip up public support for war with Iran.

Of course, there's the fact that Persia and Iran are two separate civilizations... but the people who could be convinced by this wouldn't be the people to know that now, would they?

 

[bigdog5994]

Well sure, it could be entertaining and interesting in the same way that Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation are. The obvious worry, though, is that it will have a political effect, if feckless teenagers and testosterone-poisoned men identify with the Spartans. The timing of the movie is convenient for those who would wish to whip up public support for war with Iran.

thats kind of what i thought about this movie when i saw the previews but i really like the way that Behind the mask puts it more, because i bet thats the way the story was told to little spartan boys

i havent seen this movie but it looks very good and i think ill go see it even thought i didnt like sin city

 

[bombshoo]

Despite crappy reviews I liked it alot. It seems like a lot of critics are against it for some reason. Yeah it didnt exactly make sense, but it so cool visually it could have not even had a plot and I still would have liked it as much.

At the very least it gets people interested in it. I bet a lot of people went home and googled the actual battle after seeing this. Thats why I like popular historical movies, they may be innacurate as hell but they make history cool and not just "nerd stuff"

 

[Atlas14]

It looks like the movie might be worse than Alexander. There was plenty of interesting enough history surrounding Xerxes for them to NOT make it some mythological, cartoony joke film.

 

[Civrules]

Awesome movie. Watched it yesterday.

 

[Princeps]

I absolutely hated it. The entire movie was absurd.

 

[Yeeek]

Have to wait the 21 of this month to see it in theatres. *grumble*

Last movie I've went to see in a cinema was LOTR, Return of The King. So yeah, i don't go out watching movies on the big screen that often.

 

[Pontiuth Pilate]

It was stylish while you were watching it, and preachy, absurd, and overdone in retrospect.

Here's a great review....

Sparta? No. This is madness

An expert assesses the gruesome new epic
Mar 11, 2007 04:30 AM

The battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is 300? Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, has seen the movie and offers his view.

History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.

We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.

And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan "freedom." By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.

Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta's highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas' campaign, despite 300's subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300's Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers.

Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark.

300's Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan's education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb "to Spartanize" meant "to bugger." In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.

This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus' time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.

No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.

This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.

The article kind of touches on Sparta's massive slave underclass. It doesn't mention that the Spartans would go on to lay waste to vaunted "Greece" (once in the film, idiotically, actually referred to as a "country," despite virtually all of the Greek islands plus Thessaly doing a Vichy the moment the Persian armies topped the horizon) within 25ish years of the end of the film.

 

[Yeeek]

Well, i'm not going to watch this movie for historical accuracies. Much like Kingdom of Heaven.

 

[ShannonCT]

That some of the reviewers are bashing 300 for historical innacuracies is really quite funny. The whole story is told from the point of view of a Spartan trying to rally the Spartan elders and the Spartan troops. It's presented as Spartan propaganda in the first place. And the whole story was filmed in an unrealistic comic-book style.

These reviewers who are judging the movie as a documentary on the battle of Thermopylae are completely missing the point: it's supposed to be entertainment. Perhaps they would like to turn their attentions next to scientific inaccuracies in the Star Wars trilogies.

 

[Atlas14]

Perhaps they would like to turn their attentions next to scientific inaccuracies in the Star Wars trilogies.

Already been done:
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

I would simply like to see an actual, historically accurate film about Thermopylae. There is certainly enough action to make it interesting, without resorting to boring animated, cartoonish graphics and comic-book style fighting.

 

[Hundegesicht]

I saw it, and thought it was interesting. Definately not very true to history, but if you don't let that bother you, it's enjoyable.

I have to confess, when the king went to consult the Oracle of Delphi before the battle, my first thought was about "building" it as a wonder in Civ 2.

 

[capslock]

I thought the movie was bad-ass. I'm gonna go see it again probably.

Anyone trying to take it seriously (as historically acurrate, as haveing some kind of hidden agenda about war with Iran, etc) needs to loosen up a bit and wise up.

ROFL at "testosterone poisoned men." What kind of puny computer geek comes up with a phrase like that?

 

[MjM]

The movie would not be nearly as good or intresting if it followed history strictly. Very few movies do this.

 

[History_Buff]

Sure it's not completely accurate, and they do very little of actual formation. But it's actually a fantastic movie. Even the political undertone isn't obvious: which side is America, and which side is Iraq/Iran isn't made explicitly clear.

Yes, what the Spartans do is rather fantastic, but the whole story is Narrated by old Faramir, telling the Spartans at home just what happens, and what to do about the Persians.

 

[ShannonCT]

Sure it's not completely accurate, and they do very little of actual formation. But it's actually a fantastic movie. Even the political undertone isn't obvious: which side is America, and which side is Iraq/Iran isn't made explicitly clear.

Seeing as how Frank Miller's graphic novel came out in 1998, I can't see why anyone should think that the movie is trying to say anything about the current events in the Middle East.

 

[BEHIND_THE_MASK]

Seeing as how Frank Miller's graphic novel came out in 1998, I can't see why anyone should think that the movie is trying to say anything about the current events in the Middle East.

Because you Americans all seem to be Politician-Wanna-Be's...

I think its all silly. Just enjoy the movie, dont look into things to much.