300

Year: 2007 Rating: R Overall Evaluation: 9.0 Significance Suppositions Story Style 10.0 / 10 8.0 / 10 9.0 / 10 7.0 / 10 Click HERE for evaluation criteria.

Style

Rated R for graphic battle sequences throughout, some sexuality and nudity. There are three nude scenes - two of which are sexual. None are really necessary, but I was glad to see a "hot sex scene" with a married couple - rare in Hollywood to say the least! Of course this is a very "sensual" film in the sense that it is rich in images and sounds so the nudity fits in with the rest of the film's overdone imagery. The violence is highly stylized but is actually less gory than an average horror film.

Story

This historical-fantasy film is a film version of Frank Miller's graphic novel of the same title. It is a quasi-historical account of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC in which the Spartan King Leonidas and 300 Spartans fight to the death the King of Persia, Xerxes and more than 1,000,000 man army. The Spartans use their famous phalanx strategy to fight off waves of the enemy for 3 full days against impossible odds. While this is going on, the King's wife is busy back in Sparta trying to rally support for a full military engagement with the Persians. The battle has inspired military honor for centuries.

Suppositions

The story events are pretty historically accurate, although the imagery is completely unrealistic. This is on purpose of course, in fact one of the film's writers described it as "an opera, not a documentary." Reviews of several of the film's subtexts have been both praised and criticized - I have chosen to mix these into the supposition rating rather than the overall message as each could be seen simply as a background feature and not a positive value statement. These include the strong role played by women in Sparta, the idealization of Spartan culture (although some of its evil practices were noted), the questionable pitting of "free, democratic Sparta" against "evil Persian slavers" (there is a reason the Spartans could all be soldiers - slaves did their work for them and were even killed during Spartan manhood rites), the portraying of the Persians as evil monsters and Xerxes as an androgynous giant, East vs. West racism, blah blah blah. Some of these concerns are relevant, some are simply sniveling. The fact is that no one would take this film seriously as a statement of how the enemy really looked or acted. Rather, it depicts them as they looked to the Spartans. That is part of the power of the film - it elicits emotional responses by portraying the characters as they think of themselves (it is narrated by a Spartan) and others - not how they actually existed. (If anyone is this dull enough to think the Persians had human-crab executioners and 50 foot tall elephants, they probably should never have entered a movie theater in the first place.)

Significance

The point of the movie is not to teach a history lesson, but a moral one. I suggest that the real problem the critics have is with the unapologetically Western ideal of fighting for one's culture against all odds and not giving in to evil in the name of tolerance. Whether or not Sparta was actually in the moral right is besides the point. They fought. They died. And they did it for the honor of not giving in to oppressors. The historical issues are besides the point (in this case neither culture was particularly moral - it would be different if, say, Nazi Germany was idealized as being morally upright). The overall message of the film is that it is honorable to die for what you value rather than to give in - under any circumstances - just to live.