03-19-2007, 07:26 PM
Quote:I saw 300 last night and I've got to say that I did not enjoy it at all. For a movie that I assume was trying to recount a legend, I think it failed miserably to capture a legendary feel. Most of the time, my girlfriend and I were laughing at how bad it was. More than anything, it seemed like a rip-off of the fighting scenes from Lord of the Rings; there were orcs, ogres, a deformed character that betrays the heroes. Other things that cracked me up were the inclusion of ninjas, a drug-using goat, and a bad guy straight out of Stargate SG-1. With all of this craziness, the movie just completely failed all realism checks for me and that was a major turn-off.
Overall, the documentary that I saw about the 300 Spartans on the History channel (or was it Discovery?) earlier this week was better than this movie.
A question Dragoon, did you go in expecting the movie to be realistic?
I don't think by any means Frank Miller - author of the Comic book from which the movie was made - tried to stay too historically accurate. Miller in fact was quoted saying his '300' was meant to be a kind of mythic story told over a fire. With that in mind, he started quasi-historical and took off with it from there.
As an ancient Greek major in college, I have to say I enjoyed the movie. Though, I can very easily see if you don't go in expecting that type of movie, the 300 can very quickly fail to live up to the hype. The otherworldly nature of the Persian army is indeed quite absurd. But at the same time, it does echo works like Herodotus' histories, which chronicles some of the more humorous tall-tales of the Greek time along with its historical account. For example, in Herodotus, there's stories of ants in the lands east of Persia that are as big as dogs and protect the gold dust which naturally forms on the desert sands. Of course, Frank Miller pushed the limits of this shroud of mystery in lands unknown. But for every farce, there's some historic shreds thrown in there too. The Immortals were from the eastern Persian empire, and were certainly influenced by their Asiatic neighbors, albeit not so far as to become ninjas. Or the Persians pierced faces, which was a likely custom, since Persians vehemently wished to display gold in as many places as possible.
I think the fact that 300 was not a historical film, and yet did throw in a few bits of history here and there, made it play much better than other ancient films in recent years like Troy or Alexander the Great.
Cheers,
Munk
Ps. Dragoon, I hope my post doesn't come off as an argument or a flame. I used your post kind of as a stepping off point to voice a few opinions of my own on the movie:blush: