A great idea wrought shamefully on the silver screen

Rating: 3/10 (27 March 2007)

I love epic style movies. I loved Gladiator, Clash of the Titans (as a kid) and any movie that makes history come alive. I love sports movies that have to do with comebacks, overcoming tough odds, and the like. I also have a thing for violence.
Those three factors alone made me think 300 would be one of my favorite movies. Little did I know it was possible to make an epic historical movie about fighting impossible odds with extreme violence that I would hate.
Well done, Warner Brothers.
I'll make this easy for people who want a list pros and cons, starting with the latter because it outnumbers its more optimistic forbear so heavily:
Cons:
1) The dialog is agonizingly juvenile and cliché. During a dramatic entering into the fray, the leader of the Spartans' reinforcements shouts "Lets show the Spartans what we can do!" Lines in perfect moments to drum up the drama of a scene fall flat like that over and over again until you're basically expecting it by halfway through. After the queen's impassioned speech to the senate, I found myself thinking "you've gotta be sh!^^ing me." It resonated with all the power of a fifth grader reading a George W. Bush speech off a blurry cue card. I understand that the five lines in the movie (the ones not stolen from an odd combination of recent movies and elementary school history assignments) were reported to have been spoken at the battle itself. If the entire rest of the movie weren't just as awkward and simplistic, they may have worked.
2) Points of the plot that didn't even require mention were either mentioned explicitly or repeated ad nausea. The narrator seemed very interested in reminding you that there were only 300 Spartans throughout the film. It was also made well known that the Spartans wouldn't surrender and would keep fighting, over and over again. It was as if the screenwriter were drunk and forgot he'd mentioned those points, and didn't bother to check the script before taking it to press.
3) Casting made some huge mistakes. Dilios, played by a then 40 year old David Wenham, had the faked voice of a grizzled chain smoker twice his age, seemingly to make him sound more imposing than he looked and to correspond with the narrator's voice after the fact. Considering that everybody else on the battlefield looked and sounded correct for the part, the fourth-billed actor in the film came off like Burgess Meredith with ripped abs. Needless to say, this was confusing and unnerving.
4) The sex scene when the king and queen say their intimate "goodbye, I may never see you again" should have lasted about ten seconds. Instead it was stretched to more than a minute of near pornographic detail, including the king lovingly banging his wife doggy style. I don't know what message that was trying to convey, but it was pretty out of place. For some viewers that may be seen as a plus, but my sexually adventurous girlfriend and I looked at each other and mouthed "WTF?"
5) Most of the fight scenes were so poorly explained beforehand that they seemed only to extend the runtime of the movie. I understand that there were supposedly three days of fighting, which corresponds with the alleged true story of the battle, but the plot glossed over this, instead just blindly flashing between scenes.
6) The "effects" were pathetic facsimiles of those from real movies. Every scene was filmed in a green screen sound stage. No scene had more than 20 real actors in it, when there appeared to be tens of thousands. Every "giant" in the movie was a CGI modified regular sized person. This was painfully obvious when the seemingly 8' tall King Xerxes puts his hand on Leonidus' shoulder and it just kind of floats there.
7) Plot elements were either rushed or non-existent. Without any real reason the Spartans are already going off to war within the first ten minutes of the movie. The deepest a character gets is the five seconds of doubt the king has before his freaky session with the queen, or when one character cries after his son gets decapitated. Everybody else is one dimensional. Come movie's end, a full two hour investment later you still don't give a damn about any of them.
8) The music throughout the film was at times either inappropriate or ripped straight out of a U.S. Army commercial.
There's too much else to criticize about the film so I'll mention the positives.
Pros: 1) Lots of random hot naked chicks.
2) The fighting itself was pretty cool, and they attempted to stylize this with rapidly changing camera speeds, which you may or may not like. (I didn't).
3) Some cool fake CGI mythical creatures.
4) Finally a hunchback gets a co-star nod in an action film.
5) Gerard Butler's King Leonidas is a decently strong character.
6) Abs galore.
I gave it a 3 out of 10 merely because it was "faithful to the book", which apparently should never have been adapted to film. I don't really understand the draw of mature adults reading comic books, which they've defensively re-dubbed "graphic novels", but I guess if you do, you might like this movie despite it being so poorly rendered. I liked the X-Men series a lot, and look forward to the fourth one, but this movie sucked.