A Great Film for Stupid People... Not for Anyone Else

Rating: 2/10 (9 August 2016)

If you actually like this movie, perhaps it's time to reevaluate your life.
Within a couple of minutes, it's apparent that 300 has nothing to offer but a slick new (for the time) aesthetic and some almost hilariously bad blood and violence. The writing is abysmal. The acting is absolutely horrendous. There is no historical accuracy, whatsoever. There is no realism, and there is nothing about the lack of realism that redeems its absence. The shallow themes running through the movie are juvenile. The direction is terrible. The cinematography is, well, OK.
Really, every single thing that could be screwed up in a movie is screwed up in this movie - minus the aforementioned aesthetics. 300 is over the top, and while that is not necessarily a reason to dismiss it, everything else about it is. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together should completely dismiss this steaming pile of excrement as a cinematographic failure. It should have been aborted before it hit the screen. Instead, what should have been aborted was let loose on the public, and we all know the sort of teenage frat-boy wannabes who wound up liking this. They are the sort that latch onto anything with blood and violence as a some kind of great justification for their insecurities, fragile masculinity, and moronic nationalistic tendencies. The only way this could be a more obvious ploy to appeal to bible-thumping brain-dead middle Americans would be if they'd gotten Mel Gibson to star in it and he'd wrapped himself in an American flag for two thirds of the movie. It gets one additional star for pushing Hollywood visuals in a new direction, but everything else about it is ridiculous, pathetic, immature, utterly pointless, and deserving of the lowest rating possible. The fight scenes (that make up the majority of this film) are so absurd that they might as well have been dreamed up by an 8 year old... and I think that's pretty much the greatest maturity level this film could even aspire to. Do yourself a favor and don't watch it.