300
I finally watched 300 yesterday. An odd movie. On the one hand — very competent acting, beautiful scenery, beautiful CGI, excellent battle scenes, people you are supposed to care about getting emotional, people you are supposed to care about fighting for justice, people you are supposed to care about dying… Yet somehow, I didn’t care. Walked out of the theater feeling nothing. Maybe they overdid the sepia tone and the slow motion beheadings?
A note about the historical accuracy: 300 is an adaptation of a comic book which was itself an adaptation of some Cold War propaganda. So I hardly expected 300 to be historically accurate. Indeed, it gets a few major points wrong. In reality, the 300 Spartans were accompanied by >1000 Spartan helotsslaves, and >6000 free Greeks from other cities. Most of the Greek army (including the 300 Spartan hoplites) wore heavy armor. The Persian costumes are equally wrong (compare the real Immortals with the film’s ninja-like version). Sparta was less of a marble-and-columns place and more of a thatched-roof village (the Spartans were excellent soldiers, but not architects or scientists). The Spartan culture was thoroughly homosexual (a Spartan man who did not love boys could be fined). The ephors were a town council, not a nest of subhuman ogres. And last but not least, given that the Spartan society consisted of a large population of slaves (helots) working to support a brutal militaristic aristocracy (citizens; in Sparta, citizenship could only be inherited), the portrayal of “freedom-loving Greeks” fighting an army of “Persian slaves” is a bit silly.
However, pretty much everything else is spot-on. Almost every line of dialogue is straight from Herodotus. Earth and water? Yes, that’s what the Persians really asked for. Kicking the Persian emissary down the well? Yes, that’s exactly what happened. “Come back with your shield or on it”? Standard Spartan farewell words. The hunchback? An actual historical figure. The messenger with the eyepatch? Yes, an actual person… I was pleasantly surprised that modulo magical critters, army sizes, costumes, and some major elements of Spartan culture, the movie is a pretty good portrayal of the events.
A note about the audience: the three guys sitting behind me would whoop and holler like drunk football fans whenever another head or arm got chopped off on screen. And they were not alone; I would estimate a large fraction of the audience came just for the deathporn. Now, the thing that surprised me was not so much the fact that all those people enjoyed watching death, but that they bought a ticket for 300 to satisfy their disturbing desires. You see, 300 anaesthesizes violence. You watch the CGI, but you don’t feel anything. Those fratboys ought to have rented something like Battle Royale or Reservoir Dogs… Most people just don’t have a good taste in movies.