What is the point?

Rating: 1/10 (28 March 2007)

I saw this film last week, and I couldn't put into words what I saw. This film was so mortifyingly awful that I needed time to find words to really describe it. The words I came up with are insane, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, gratuitously violent, and not at all entertaining. I thought to myself that this will be the film viewed by a disturbed teenager who plans on doing the next Columbine type of murder.
Not only is the story bad, but I also hated the fact that I felt like I was looking at a Playstation video game for two hours. Every scene was filled with this flat, boring, dreary-looking copper-color. The music is so cliché that I could have hummed it in my sleep. I rolled my eyes every moment the opera-like singing started.
The viewer is suppose to be rooting for the Spartans, but because they come across as blood-thirsty psychopaths who were only put on earth for battle, I found myself rooting against them. Yes, war and violence are apart of life, but the realistic human emotions that are a result of war makes movies about the subject matter fascinating (i.e. Braveheart and Gladiator, two great films). This film cares nothing about story and human emotions. All this film cares about is showing spears go inside and then back out of a human body with blood splattered about and cliché dialogue in between. Even be-headings are played out as if the only result the filmmaker is going for are the three words "that was cool!"
I didn't understand why the leader of the Persian side, the mascara and piercing faced Xerxes, had to come off as a mix between Rupaul and Bam Bam Bigelow. The reverberated voice that they used for the character was distracting and unnecessary. Also, I kept wondering why Xerxes kept using the words "kneel in front of me," to the leader of the Spartans, and in one scene Xerxes places his hands on the leader of the Spartans in a way that seemed sexual. It was just plain weird and unnecessary!
From the casting, the viewer thinks that the enemy Persians are nothing more than effeminate Asians and other dark people of the earth that are trying to bring down the tough and ripped bodied white male Spartans that are outnumbered.
The one woman in the film came across as a fool that is so easily deceived (and deceived into having sex!) that her only salvation is to stab her enemy with a sword. Of course, her enemy conveniently carried around Persian coins that fell all over the place when he was stabbed, this conveniently showed us in a spoon-fed way that this guy is a trader. No thinking allowed in this movie!! The only other use for the female character in this film is a ridiculous soft- core sex scene.
Instead of this movie just coming off as a fantasy, it takes itself way too seriously and as a result I kept shaking my head at the blatant stupidity. In Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino plays out a scene with Uma Thurman defeating a bunch of ninjas in a way where the viewer is disconnected from reality but is in awe of the cinematic technique of the film. In 300, when the 300 Spartans are defeating a gazillion enemies, you could almost hear the director saying, "These guys are so tough that this could REALLY happen.... until the end of the movie, that is."
Actors are not necessary for this film. It is as if the casting director went to Gold's Gym for the casting. Pectoral muscles get the screen time that isn't taken by spears and blood. Even the stale jokes told by the Spartans seem like the brainless banter of a stereotypical gym rat.
300 is an experiment in digital pop-art cinema gone wrong! Unlike pop-art cinema like A Scanner Darkly that advances visual aesthetic by saying something about the human condition through its story, 300 is a let down via story and visually. The entire outcome of the film leaves the viewer asking in a confused tone, "What was the point of that?"