300

Another comic-book movie. Another green-screen movie, shot entirely in a warehouse in Toronto with all scenery CGIed in later, like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but with no sense of humor. Based—very loosely—on the Battle of Thermopylae between the Spartan Greeks and the Persian Empire of Xerxes. I figure history may have exaggerated it a little, but the story goes that 300 Spartans held off an army of … well, in the movie, billions. This, being a comic book, exaggerates it a lot. I doubt that Xerxes was a 7-foot-tall African, for instance.
These things are written and drawn primarily for pimpled teen fanboys who would run screaming and puking and pissing themselves if they ever found themselves facing a real swordsman, so everything plays to their longing for power. All male characters are pumped to the point they’d make Our Guv look like a pathetic girly man. Females, when they appear at all, are half boobs and half ass, with lips like Angelina Jolie. Mighty sword thrusts pierce craven barbarian bodies and scatter gobbets of gore, then are pulled out to thrust into the next one. Faces are in perpetual battle snarls, muscles are always clenched. It is the stupidest drivel you can imagine, and I didn’t buy into it even when I was a pimpled youth myself.
However … if you are into this sort of thing (which I’m not), this is the ne plus ultra of gore-‘n’-sandals comic books. The word is that the director, Zack Snyder, reproduced the comic book by Frank Miller almost panel for panel, and if so, then I have to hand it to Miller. He’s got a real eye for composition, and he can sure draw. It is very fetching to the eye. If you do like gore for gore’s sake (which I don’t) this gives you buckets of it, artfully splashed around. If you like a screenplay stripped down to its bare essentials (and I do, sometimes), then this is a pretty good one. There is surprising humor in some of the we-who-are-about-to-die dialogue of the Spartan King, Leonidas. And I felt my goose pimples quacking, just a little bit, at some of his lines.
I guess there’s really no point, but I have to mention something else, which is the bitter pill in the center of this story. Times without number Leonidas exhorts his men by bellowing that they’re fighting for their freedom.
Freedom. My friends, in the last 7 years I’ve come to dread hearing that word, because it usually comes from the mouth of that whining little mouse, George W. Bush. And his definition of freedom and mine couldn’t be farther apart. In his understanding, the best way to ensure our “freedom” is by hacking at the Tree of Liberty, root and branch, and by lying to get us into quagmires in the name of the War on Terror, which is code for the War to Get All That Raghead Oil. Leonidas is the same way, contemptuous of the “slave armies” of Persia, while apparently forgetting (at least in this movie) that one of the things he’s fighting for is the right of Greeks to own slaves. In fact, at the Battle of Thermopylae it seems there were 1000 helot slaves, as many as the Spartan and other Greek forces combined. I’ll bet their blood ran as red as Spartan blood.