The movie is, like Sin City, based on his graphic novel.
The graphic novel was great. Occasionally the art was a little underimpressive, but the writing was phenomenal.
However, the release date means the movie is a dud (at least, according to Hollywood), since it's not out around the peak seasons for what the wheels consider major moneymaker pics.
And, by the way, the 300 is based upon history. Sparta defending all of Greece against a Persian invasion through Thermopylae. Spartans weren't exactly some grand democratic example, but the story is an impressive one insofar as it makes a strong statement of the nobility of self-sacrifice. That might be a message Hollywood expects to be selling poorly around now.
DO NOT go see this movie, if you are looking for historical movie. You will be sorely disappointed. It is based on a graphic novel in a historical setting, not history.
With that said, Frank Miller does some great writing, and 300 is a very good read.
Quite unfortunately, freedom for the Spartans, as they defined it, required the institutionalized enslavement, torture and murder of tens of thousands. The Spartans had a great deal more in common with the Nazis than with Americans.
We can still respect and honor their bravery, but for myself only in the sense that I can honor the same characteristics in the SS.
Not that their Greek allies or Persian enemies were exactly American in their ideals either.
Leonidas BUMP
Thanks Perdogg for the ping. 7thson, it seems to me that there's a topic about this movie, somewhere, but I'm too lazy to find it. I've not seen it. The Spartan sacrifice at Thermopylae was a holding action which delayed the Persian advance a few days, and also it was a political maneuver to recover some prestige for Sparta, which a few years earlier had refused to participate in the defense of Greece, and saw Athens and other cities whip the Persians at the Battle of Marathon.
The Greeks had also withdrawn before the Persian navy, and the Persian army sacked Athens (the carved proclamation to the inhabitants to take refuge in the hills ahead of time actually still exists), then was lured into the Bay of Salamis by Themistocles' famous ruse. The Battle of Salamis eliminated the Persian navy, and led Xerxes the Persian king to retreat in a hurry to Anatolia.
The combined Greek armies, including that of Sparta, defeated the Persian land forces at Plataea.
During the Pelopponesian War the Spartans took money from the Persians, the latter being interested in the defeat and destruction of Athens and the divisions within Greece, with a view to keeping them out of Persia's business in Anatolia. The strategy worked, but Alexander the Great conquered Greece, and led a united Greek and Macedonian army across the Persian Empire.
Themistocles also wound up on the Persian payroll, ruling as a governor or something in one of the cities of Asia Minor which had been conquered by the Persians. His home city, Athens, had voted to ostracize him, and he was banished from the city for ten years. He never went back. If you're looking for a metaphor...
Probably not - Miller's a libertarian with a strong love of America.
He wants to write a comic book in which Batman fights al-Qaeda, after all.
The special effects look absurdly fake.
It is the same kind of fictional narrative that "Killer Angels" was about the Battle of Gettysburg. One of the studios was planning to turn Gates of Fire into a movie. However, after "Alexander" and "Troy" tanked at the box office, the movie plans were scrapped
Come and take them!
Has anyone have any inside info concerning the movie and/or storyline?
yes,
it's a bowling movie.
Leonidas hand picked the 300 because they were all FATHERS.
The men all left sons behind who would carry on the blood line of the brave men.
For those who don't know this is where we get the phrase MOLON LABE. (come get them) This was when the persians demanded the spartans surrender and leave their weapons behind. The spartan replied by saying come get them.
There is much MISinformation about the ancients (having studied the real deal in Greece). So be wary of folks who are too quick to view the ancient world with revisionist history lenses.
The Persian army was between 100,000 and 1,000,000 strong (I guess record keeping wasn't the best back then). If not for the demoralizing impact the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae had on the Persians, they would have likely overtaken the Greeks, and western culture would likely have perished.
The Battle of Tours with Martel had the same impact. If not for that battle, the west would likely have been destroyed by the east. It decided that the Christians and not Muslims would be the ruling power in Europe. Would America even have been settled if the muslims won? If it had, would it have been as free as it is/was?
Who were the Persians? Today we would say Iran and the surrounding area. Who did Martel defeat? The Moors and Muslims.
Who are we fighting today?
I look at the US (and parts of Canada, the UK, Australia, and Poland) as the 300. Even within the US, only a small part of us acknowledge that this really is a battle between the east and the west and which culture will survive. Hopefully, we can hold off the enemy long enough for our side to get organized and ready to fight.
Molon Labe!!!
Greek ping!
Many of us are counting the days for this one to open.
The First Persian War - Greek Wars
Iranian Cultural Heritage | 8/21/04 | Iranian Cultural Heritage
Posted on 08/21/2004 10:35:01 PM EDT by freedom44
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1196577/posts
MOLON LABE(Come and get 'em)
Multiple instances | Unknown, though thought to be shortly after 500BC | Historical
Posted on 08/14/2002 10:11:57 PM EDT by Freemeorkillme
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/733353/posts
Now *this* is peculiar:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=300
It shows as a keyword in this topic, but this topic isn't listed in the keyword.
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I went to the Hollywood Premier of the "300" last night, and talked a bit with Director Zack Snyder, screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, and graphic novelist Frank Miller. There will be lots of controversy about this film—well aside from erroneous allegations that it is pro- or anti-Bush, when the movie has nothing to do with Iraq or contemporary events, at least in the direct sense. (Miller's graphic novel was written well before the "war against terror" commenced under President Bush).
I wrote an introduction for the accompanying book about the film when Kurt Johnstad came down to Selma to show me a CD advanced unedited version last October, but some additional reflections follow from last night.
There are four key things to remember about the film: it is not intended to be Herodotus Book 7.209-236, but rather is an adaptation from Frank Miller's graphic novel, which itself is an adaptation from secondary work on Thermopylai. Purists should remember that when they see elephants and a rhinoceros or scant mention of the role of those wonderful Thespians who died in greater numbers than the Spartans at Thermopylai.
Second, in an eerie way, the film captures the spirit of Greek fictive arts themselves. Snyder and Johnstad and Miller are Hellenic in this sense: red-figure vase painting especially idealized Greek hoplites through "heroic nudity". Such iconographic stylization meant sometimes that armor was not included in order to emphasize the male physique.
So too the 300 fight in the film bare-chested. In that sense, their oversized torsos resemble not only comic heroes, but something of the way that Greeks themselves saw their own warriors in pictures. And even the loose adaptation of events reminds me of Greek tragedy, in which an Electra, Iphigeneia or Helen in the hands of a Euripides is portrayed sometimes almost surrealistically, or at least far differently from the main narrative of the Trojan War, followed by the more standard Aeschylus, Sophocles and others.
Third, Snyder, Johnstad, and Miller have created a strange convention of digital backlot and computer animation, reminiscent of the comic book mix of Sin City. That too is sort of like the conventions of Attic tragedy in which myths were presented only through elaborate protocols that came at the expense of realism (three male actors on the stage, masks, dialogue in iambs, with elaborate choral meters, violence off stage, 1000-1600 lines long, etc.).
There is irony here. Oliver Stone's mega-production Alexander spent tens of millions in an effort to recapture the actual career of Alexander the Great, with top actors like Collin Farrel, Anthony Hopkins, and Angelina Joilie. But because this was a realist endeavor, we immediately were bothered by the Transylvanian accent of Olympias, Stone's predictable brushing aside of facts, along with the distortions, and the inordinate attention given to Alexander's supposed proclivities. But the "300" dispenses with realism at the very beginning, and thus shoulders no such burdens. If characters sometimes sound black-and-white as cut-out superheroes, it is not because they are badly-scripted Greeks, as was true in Stone's film, but because they reflect the parameters of the convention of graphic novels, comic books, and surrealistic cinematography. Also I liked the idea that Snyder et al. were more outsiders than Stone, and pulled something off far better with far less resources and connections. The acting proved excellent—again, ironic when the players are not marquee stars.
Fourth, but what was not conventionalized was the martial spirit of Sparta that comes through the film. Many of the most famous lines in the film come directly either from Herodotus or Plutarch's Moralia, and they capture well, in the historical sense, the collective Spartan martial ethic, honor, glory, and ancestor reverence (I say that as an admirer of democratic Thebes and its destruction of Sparta's system of Messenian helotage in 369 BC).
Why—beside the blood-spattering violence and often one-dimensional characterizations—will some critics not like this, despite the above caveats?
Ultimately the film takes a moral stance, Herodotean in nature: there is a difference, an unapologetic difference between free citizens who fight for eleutheria and imperial subjects who give obeisance. We are not left with the usual postmodern quandary 'who are the good guys' in a battle in which the lust for violence plagues both sides. In the end, the defending Spartans are better, not perfect, just better than the invading Persians, and that proves good enough in the end. And to suggest that ambiguously these days has perhaps become a revolutionary thing in itself.
03/06 02:55 PM