The 300
The 300, movie
Well, that royally sucked. I mean, it's incredibly artistic- every shot carefully coposed and monochromed and bronzed and framed and
lighted to within an inch of it's life- and I daresay it does better and more gore than just about anything to hit the theaters ever, so
it's satisfying if that's what you want.
And it uses a lot of verbatim quotes from Herodotus in an effort to claim to be authentic, which bothers me even more because, as fun as
it is to hear "then we will fight in the shade!" and "tonight we dine in hell!" they're missing something a great deal more basic. There is
no sense of GREECE in this movie, no sense of it's divided and quarreling and complex and diverse nature, no real sense of what these
men are fighting so hard to preserve. Spartans are just unusually buff modern men, more or less, and they us the same words we do to
justify a war- justice, freedom, democracy. The fundamental foreignness, so essential to understand in ancient history, is missing. That means that the fundamental sameness that we might otherwise have seen doesn't mean anything at all. You can't just make Greeks modern men, it does no justice, and you certainly can't do that to Spartans, which are a complex problem for our self-conception of
ourselves as descended from Greeks. Dammit, the whole issue deserves more than that!
I should also mention the interesting fact that this movie conflates physical beauty with more goodness, and vice-versa, more than any
other pop culture artifact I've ever seen. It's ironically historically appropriate, of course, but a bit startling to be done in such a bald-faced way. It also has a bit of a schizophrenia issue, between the beefcake and the homophobia. But all that is secondary, really, to the simple fact that this isn't a movie about Thermopolae- and it could have been. Can you imagine these actors, this budget, this CGI, combined with writing and directing that really wanted to do it right? Oh, what it could have been...
Well, that royally sucked. I mean, it's incredibly artistic- every shot carefully coposed and monochromed and bronzed and framed and
lighted to within an inch of it's life- and I daresay it does better and more gore than just about anything to hit the theaters ever, so
it's satisfying if that's what you want.
And it uses a lot of verbatim quotes from Herodotus in an effort to claim to be authentic, which bothers me even more because, as fun as
it is to hear "then we will fight in the shade!" and "tonight we dine in hell!" they're missing something a great deal more basic. There is
no sense of GREECE in this movie, no sense of it's divided and quarreling and complex and diverse nature, no real sense of what these
men are fighting so hard to preserve. Spartans are just unusually buff modern men, more or less, and they us the same words we do to
justify a war- justice, freedom, democracy. The fundamental foreignness, so essential to understand in ancient history, is missing. That means that the fundamental sameness that we might otherwise have seen doesn't mean anything at all. You can't just make Greeks modern men, it does no justice, and you certainly can't do that to Spartans, which are a complex problem for our self-conception of
ourselves as descended from Greeks. Dammit, the whole issue deserves more than that!
I should also mention the interesting fact that this movie conflates physical beauty with more goodness, and vice-versa, more than any
other pop culture artifact I've ever seen. It's ironically historically appropriate, of course, but a bit startling to be done in such a bald-faced way. It also has a bit of a schizophrenia issue, between the beefcake and the homophobia. But all that is secondary, really, to the simple fact that this isn't a movie about Thermopolae- and it could have been. Can you imagine these actors, this budget, this CGI, combined with writing and directing that really wanted to do it right? Oh, what it could have been...