Movie or video game??

Rating: 3/10 (14 April 2007)

I'm not exactly a fan of action movies, but I am not against violent scenes and fights as long as there is a good plot with them. That's what I was expecting from this movie: an interesting storyline together with great film graphics. I only got the second part: the ultimate movie graphics of gratuitous violence, which in itself can't really make a movie worth watching for me.
During the whole movie I felt that everything was overly dramatized and over the top, which actually prevented one from caring for those characters. No character depth, all was black or white, the handsome brave Spartans and the evil Persian monsters. No real history reference to make the movie the least realistic: good and evil were simply hyperbolised up to the point the scenes became comic or grotesque. The movie had a great potential to build a good story over the historical background of the Spartans, but ended up totally predictable and with basically no plot. From the very start when including those monsters, it seemed this movie wasn't trying to portray any historical or human reality, but just shock and impress through its graphics. And apparently most of the people fell for it. Just as much a video game could do, but this is not what I am expecting from a movie.
Not to mention the sexual scenes (since this sells best and is in line with the good plot), the first one ridiculous in slow motion, the one with the hunchback simply gross. Then the very witty ending, when all 298 die (since basically we had only seen one dying through the whole slaughter until then, while another is gone to let spartans know the tragedy).
This film leaves one so totally numb to all the human suffering and so distant to the historical reality and the characters, that it equals playing a video game. If this is what people want to see: men slaughtered, blood and flesh to exclaim after it "That was really cool", why bother and make a film of it and not the ultimate playstation game?