300 (2 Disc Special Edition) [2007] (DVD)

Silly, overblown and artificial but still oddly moving '300' is one of those mainstream films that is better the second time you watch it, which is another way of saying that it's not all that good. We can expect really good, serious films to be tough going the first time round, because really good directors have a personal way of saying things that is sometimes difficult by virtue of being unfamiliar. Zack Snyder, however, is not a really good director. He's a talented Hollywood director who lucked into a vivid retelling of a good story, in this case Frank Miller's passionate and visually striking but lurid and inaccurate version of the heroic-but-doomed defence of the pass of Thermopylae by a small Greek army against a massive Persian one. The battle of Thermopylae has been called, with some justice, the most important battle in the history of what is sometimes called Western civilisation. Although the Greeks ultimately lost, their collective and determined self-sacrifice helped to boost the morale of the Greek side, with the result that the Persian empire didn't actually conquer Greece in 478BC but went home to lick its wounds - with the further result that Greek civilisation developed in the uniquely individual and ornery way that it did, giving us (among other things) the invention of tragic drama, history and philosophy, plus a lot of really good poetry. Thermopylae was one of the very few times in history when it was truly necessary for a small cadre of dedicated soldiers to defend the freedom that others enjoyed. The film doesn't really work, though, because it relies almost entirely on the book, which is itself filtered through Frank Miller's rather manic Orientalism. The Persian king Xerxes, who was in real life a weak, ignorant and over-ambitious character with a desire to avenge his father's failures, and who was therefore not totally unlike the current US President, is here presented as a sleazily androgynous giant whose court is full of lots of same-sex sex. You would never know from this movie that the Spartans practised institutional pederasty; that all Spartan adolescent boys went through a period of being the lovers of older men. In the movie, King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, very good, gruff and apparently channelling Sean Connery) refers to his temporary Athenian allies as 'boy-lovers', which is pretty ironic seeing as he would have been one himself in real life. Having said that, the performances are good. Lena Headey is especially fine as Queen Gorgo, one of the very few ancient Greek women about whom we have much evidence and who, by most accounts, was very much as we see her here - blunt, to the point, honourable, determined and courageous. The depiction of the battle itself is frankly wacky, with eight-feet-tall monsters standing in for the largely conscript Persian army, but the ultimate emotional significance of the stand at Thermopylae does come across, even if the film is wildly inaccurate in every detail except the dialogue (e.g. when challenged by the Persians to lay down arms, Leonidas really is supposed to have replied 'Come and get them.') So it's a big fantasy, and if you really want to know what it was like at Thermopylae or how they came to be there in the first place, I suggest you read a good book on the subject. But the film, like Miller's graphic novel, does admirably capture what Thermopylae has to come to mean from almost as soon as it originally happened - heroic self-sacrifice in the name of a good cause. The Spartans themselves did not practice democracy, and indeed their whole society was built on the exploitation and enslavement of others. But if they hadn't stood at Thermopylae and made an example, Western history might have been very different. Benevolent despotism might have been the only political system we had ever heard of. Also, there's some great hacking and slashing. It's not a major film, but it's fun. Just don't take it for anything like accuracy. And the CGI does get a bit annoying.

An impressive product Epic based on a Frank Millar graphic novel set in ancient times telling the violent tale of 300 Spartan warriors who led by their king Leonidas (played by Gerard Butler) defend their Greek city-state Sparta against the might of the Persian empire and its emperor Xerxes (played by Lost's Rodrigo Santoro), who fancies himself a god and seeks to invade Sparta and make it a part of his empire. The driving point of this film is the battle of a few against the many, and heroism, courage and bravery in the face of impossible odds. An excellent film, with a good plot, impressive visuals, many strong personalities - not least of all Leonidas's wife, the queen of Sparta (played by Lena Headley) - and excellent fight scenes. The Spartan warriors are a formidable bunch, with lethal fighting skills which are put on full display and you will find yourself rooting for the Spartans and admiring their values. Although there is a slightly sentimental speech at the very end of the film this is still a very impressive product. Recommended.

For WWF fans only Aaaargh....this is without doubt one of the worst films I have ever seen. No-brain, digitally-enhanced morons with minimal similarity to the original 300 heroes spend their time exuding testosterone and shouting at each other, before rushing off to kill thousands of incompetent Persians in impossible ways with amusement-arcade-standard animation. American wrestling fans will drool and believe every word. This is seriously BAD.

A Spartan propaganda piece, excellently told 300 is one of the most critically divisive movies of recent years, with Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes both giving it a score in the 50-60 range, indicating a near-equal divide between those who love and hate it. It's understandable. On a surface reading, this movie is vapid, stupid, ludicrously over-the-top and even less historically accurate that other recent liberty-taking films such as Gladiator and U-571. However, 300 may also be the most textually-misread film of our times. In fact, the movie is an excellently-staged piece of propaganda. Imagine if Joseph Goebbels had travelled back in time with a modern CGI team and had been paid by the Spartans to tell the world how awesome their soldiers were (frankly, that sounds like a great idea for a film in itself), and you'd end up with a movie like this. Seen in that light, 300 becomes a great deal more intriguing. The movie is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, The 300, and opens in 480 BC. Ten years earlier, the Greek armies had defeated the invading Persians under Darius at Marathon, but now his son Xerxes has returned with a vast army. The Greek city-states are preparing to resist, but everything rests on Sparta, the most formidable of the Greek cities. Unfortunately, the Ephors, the priests of Sparta, are insisting that the Spartans celebrate the feast of the Carneia, during which time Spartans cannot go to war. King Leonidas disobeys and takes a small force of 300 men north, joining up with some additional Greek troops along the way. Leonidas' plan is to force the Persians to meet the Greeks at the Hot Gates (Thermopylae, a narrow pass only a few dozen feet wide between the mountains and the sea) where the Persians' vastly superior numbers (120,000+ ) will not avail them. Whilst the Spartans hold off the Persian advance for three days of almost non-stop combat (fighting the Persian Immortals, gunpowder-throwing troops and war-rhinos and elephants, presumably from Persia's territories in Africa or India), Leonidas' wife Gorgo attempts to persuade the Spartan council to defy the Ephors and send the remainder of Sparta's 10,000-strong army to aid Leonidas. The narrative is somewhat simple and straightforward, with frantic, balletic combat sequences at the Hot Gates mixed in with political maneuverings back in Sparta. These are not particularly complex, but do increase dramatic tension in the storyline. During the lengthy sequences where no dialogue is spoken on-screen, we get narration by Dilios (David Wenham, better known as Faramir from the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy), who is our Goebbels-like figure, relating the story of the battle to a Spartan audience some months later. Intriguingly, some of his dialogue is directly lifted from contemporary sources such as Aeschylus or later commentators like Plutarch for added effect. Because the movie is concerned explicitly with recreating scenes from the graphic novel, the acting is somewhat stilted and dialogue tends to be minimalistic, with plenty of emphasis on speeches and dramatic pronounciations (such as the infamous, "Tonight we dine in HELL!" or the "Come get them!" response to a Persian demand to lay down their arms, although interestingly this is actually mentioned in classical accounts of the battle). It is quite notable that the acting and dialogue in the sequences back in Sparta - a subplot established only in the film - is much more traditional. Stylistically the movie is a tremendous achievement, with extensive CGI backgrounds and colour grading combining to give the film an almost unique visual identity of its own. The battle sequences are exceptionally impressive, if totally unrealistic, although the dramatic shifts between slow-motion and normal speed become rather boring after a while. Musically, the film shifts from a traditional score to a more rock-like theme which is used at moments of extreme drama or action, but it works reasonably well. 300 is definitely a very interesting film with a unique visual identity. The actors do a generally good job given the limitations they are working under. However, a lot of people can't quite get to grips with what the film is actually about and spend an enormous amount of time moaning about the Spartans not wearing armour, calling the Athenians boy-lovers when pedastry was actually instituionalised among the Spartan warrior class, having the Ephors as deformed priests rather than an elected council or kicking Persian diplomats down a well when in fact this was an incident from the earlier Persian invasion under Darius (and Xerxes didn't send diplomats to Athens or Sparta during his attack because of this). All of this is totally irrelevant: the film is a story being told by the highly imaginative Dilios to get the Spartan army riled up for the Battle of Plataea. His depiction of the Persians as lunatic dual-wielding masked swordsmen led by a ten-foot-tall androgyne (a near-unrecognisable Rodrigo Santoro, better known as the short-lived Paulo from Season 3 of Lost) is due to him wanting to portray the enemy as a monstrous force to be destroyed, and not because either the director or the writer wanted to make racist slurs against Iran. That said, a lot of viewers may dislike the film simply because it is so ludicrously over-the-top on almost every level, from its snarling villains to lecherous old priests to gigantic war-rhinos. As for myself, I thoroughly enjoyed it. 300 is available now on DVD in the UK and the USA. The director, Zack Snyder, is currently filming a movie adaption of the seminal graphic novel Watchmen for release in 2009.

Was I surprised? Yes I was. I so enjoyed this film, I watched it again the same day.