Posted on 03/02/2007 3:01:09 PM PST by MARKUSPRIME
Its the spartans fighting for freedom and democracy vs the persian empire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhi5x7V3WXE
Bookmarking for later. Looks good.
I don't get it, is it a cartoon, a video game?
What is the gimmick supposed to be, with flying people and such?
Its a movie.
I can't click directly on a Youtube link without getting a mass of JavaScript.
I can go directly to Youtub, search for, and watch a video with no problem.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Mnaaaah... Ok it looks impressive (visually...). But it's way more anout fantasy, fiction and matrix-esque style than about real history. Not my taste...
I agree. Looks REALLY cool!
Yeah its based on the graphic novel. Its fantasy based on a historical battle,but it looks very good.
Looks like an upgunned version of the original ("The 300 Spartans" starring Richard Egan), with a lot more sex and special effects. Deal me in!
Actually, Spartan society was anything but free, but they were real badassess in battle.
There are better trailers for it at http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/300/
Yes. Freedom doesn't describe Sparta. A battle for sovereignty and identity would be a better fit.
This would make an unbelievably good movie without the fantasy.
Absolutely. Hollywood hasn't learned that sometimes history doesn't need to be embellished....like the proposed movie about Valerie Plame and her worthless husband.
Then I read this http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101106.html by Victor Davis Hanson. If you are unfamiliar with him, he is a classist professor and sometimes conservative commentator who appears on NRO sometimes. He is the author of "Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience", "Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom", and "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War" among others (see his complete list here - http://www.victorhanson.com/Books/index.html)
I have re-thunk my position and will probably see it.
Will there be magic robots, too?
"300, of course, makes plenty of allowance for popular tastes, changing and expanding the story to meet the protocols of the comic book genre. The film was not shot on location outdoors, but in a studio using the so-called “digital backlot” technique of sometimes placing the actors against blue screens. The resulting realism is not that of the sun-soaked cliffs above the blue Aegean — Thermopylae remains spectacularly beautiful today — but of the eerie etchings of the comic book.
The Spartans fight bare-chested without armor, in the “heroic nude” manner that ancient Greek vase-painters portrayed Greek hoplites, their muscles bulging as if they were contemporary comic book action heroes. Again, following the Miller comic, artistic license is made with the original story — the traitor Ephialtes is as deformed in body as he is in character; King Xerxes is not bearded and perched on a distant throne, but bald, huge, perhaps sexually ambiguous, and often right on the battlefield. The Persians bring with them exotic beasts like a rhinoceros and elephant, and the leader of the Immortals fights Leonidas in a duel (which the Greeks knew as monomachia). Shields are metal rather than wood with bronze veneers, and swords sometimes look futuristic rather than ancient.
Again, purists must remember that 300 seeks to bring a comic book, not Herodotus, to the screen."
Perhaps (I'm no expert), but here is what Victor Davis Hanson (who is one) says about the film (see post #15):
"If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus — who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against Persian autocracy, free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty, their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others."
QUOTED FOR TRUTH.
"300" is a comic book brought to the screen, in the same fashion as Frank Miller's "Sin City".
This is not history, this is Art.
I'm no stranger to the use of the word "freedom" in history. Yet it was not used to describe freedom as we do today. For some Greeks it was close, but not for the Spartans.
Throughout history "Freedom" is used in reference to the people, not the individual, and that is what I pointed out. "Our freedom" is a royal "our" for most before 1776. As a people the Spartans were extremely independent and incredibly defensive of their sovereignty. As individuals, there was no true freedom in Sparta.
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