Utter Rubbish!!!!!

Rating: 1/10 (2 April 2007)

I know that my comments on this movie will be about as welcome as the presence of a French atheist at a White House prayer breakfast, but I cannot let this one pass easily.
This has to be one of the worst movies of the 21st Century, and that's saying something when one compares it to trash like "Apocalypto" and "The Passion of the Christ." Don't try to analyse it as either documentary history or as a piece of drama. "300" is a self-propelling video game for insecure peri-teen males in the First World, racist and homophobic, heavy on the gore and with a simplistic morality of "Good" versus "Evil" that would gladden the heart of both Neo-cons and red-state pulpit-pounding preachers alike.
Not only will testosterone flushed youths enjoy this movie; there will be adults who will applaud it too, on the grounds that "if it gets that nut job in Iran all bent out of shape more power to it."  The trouble is that "300" is not merely getting up the nose of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but insulting the history and quite impressive culture of nearly seventy million people, a fair percentage of whom doubtless share the aforementioned opinion of their president  mind you, their antipathy to the "nut job" will not save them from being bombed back into the stone age as punishment for their devious "crime" of secreting our oil under their sand.
Some will try to alleviate the "guilty pleasure" of enjoying this movie with the platitude that it might encourage people to look into the real history of the time period. Fat chance!!! The infinitesimal number of people whose viewing of a "historical" movie actually inspires them to study history are soon marginalized and eased out of the cultural discourse of their community  unless, of course, their study confirms existing prejudices. In my country, those whose reading of history leads them to question the official narrative are characterized as "latte drinking/chardonnay sipping, Volvo driving elites, out of touch with the ordinary person." I imagine that the situation elsewhere in the "Anglosphere" is little different.
"Hollywood" is not about truth (otherwise Leonidas would be killing a slave, not a wolf, as a rite of passage). Hollywood exists to wrap the ideology of the US ruling classes in a glitzy package called "Entertainment" and present the status quo as the best of all possible worlds. When it comes to History, Hollywood depicts reality not as it was, nor even as we remember it, but as we would like to remember it.
Given that the Spiderman movie, to name just one, was held back because it showed the World Trade Centre, the really interesting question is why "300" was released precisely at this point in time, given the likelihood of another "Coalition of the Willing" smashing its way into Iran.