300

[robin_d_laws]

The elements I liked about 300 were sufficiently cool that I wanted to buy into the flick completely. Couldn’t quite get there, though. Part of the problem is structural; the climax occurs at the end of the first act. Mainly, though, I kept being tossed out of the movie by the excessive use of voice-over. I understand the desire to be faithful to

Comments

Re: 300 -- Fox News

[sorceror]

1) The Spartans were not the paragons of "freedom" as described in the movie. They enslaved the Helots, who did most of the work of actually running the Spartan city-state, which is why the Spartan men were able to specialize as warriors. Freedom, to a Spartan, was a virtue limited to other Spartans, not to people as a whole (or even Greeks as a group.)

Yep. The same could be said of the ancient Romans.

In fact, it could also be said of Revolutionary America.

Anyway, a friend told me that the movie is wrong on other counts beyond these and the Toronto Star article. Apparently the battle was the end result of a campaign that was a catalog of blunders: Leonidas was actually leading a large pan-Greek army, but realized at the last minute that he'd screwed up and set them up for annihilation. So he ordered the main body of the army to escape to fight another day while he and his 300 Spartans + over 700 other Greeks held off Xerxes at Thermopylae.

And of course, there's the inconvenient fact that Greece was *really* saved by the (primarily Athenian) Greek fleet's victory at Salamis. It was that battle that cut Xerxes' army off from supplies, and thus ensured he had to withdraw.