One-Eyed Reporter

Rating: Null/10 (29 March 2007)

The title refers to "the good friend" character who gives a memorial speech at the end, presenting the legacy that grows to fantastic proportions on its way to us as narrator whose words are from another planet. Presumably you as a viewer will make the association I did the with the demigods of Olympus, so artificial and childlike are the notions this narrator presents. They are so simple and extreme, these notions of how the world is abstracted through one eye..
It allows us to take a very few indicators and suppose a world. Deliberate deprivation of young boys is supposed to somehow instill valor. Flying blood droplets is supposed to somehow validate combat expertise. Tactical stubbornness leading to defeat is somehow celebrated, I suppose, coming very close to the 72 virgins bit. Yes, indeed, sometimes this slipped for me into the opposite of what it was intended to purify. The elixir of admiration for the west snapped to Zoroastrian soma more often than not.
That's because the history is that the Persians (the Achaemenids were actually Medes, more like Afghans are today) were the great world-builders of the era, creating less a totalitarian state than a federation of free states that flourished by trade not terror. And the Spartans were the thugs, the warlords who oppressed and terrorized their neighbors, building a state based on pillaged wealth. Even the Nazi association is reversed, the Medes were the Aryans, the Spartans essentially African, and no longer extant in today's Greece.
(Later, the Alexandran Macedonians, the Greeks of today, destroyed the by then corrupt and fragile Persian empire and all its great libraries and histories, torturing the collected scientists to death, in what has to have been the greatest and most brutal setbacks of civilization ever.)
So the resonances with today keep oscillating in a strange and stimulating dance between the intended admiration of these thugs we are meant to feel as the west, and those of Islam. But that "struggle" is over issues as remote from this as swimsuits are from locomotives. Let's even say vinyl padded speedos.
As a movie, the thing is oddly uneven. It's tied together by a consistent score, mixed of heavy metal and aeolian voices. And it does have a story, actually two; though simple, they span the thing and stitch pieces together. But there are distinct visual styles here, too many to integrate. I felt actually as if I were defending myself from some of them as they came at me just as the different components of the Persian army attacked the 300 hooting bodybuilders.
Its inevitable I suppose, when the computer work is so massive it has to be parsed out to creative teams distributed all over the world, and they have nothing better to go on than a comic book. I will admit that some of the these teams gave me great satisfaction, some of them in the actual battle scenes where the speed-shifts worked to emphasize the mapping of comic panels into reality. This, if you follow such things, was developed by Peter Weir in "Gallipoli," starring a then new Mel Gibson. Mel then sorta borrowed them for his own battle epic, including the early scene where he lops off a head. Here we emphasize the flying bodies, body parts and blood which quite literally become architectural. In fact there are three distinct architectural structures here made of bodies, and many others large and small made of living men.
For me the center of the thing is the early scene where the oracle is consulted. Three bits of background.
 when I see this plot device early in a movie, someone with a vision (or dream or hallucination) I tend to see the rest of the movie as what's in that vision. In other words here, when this girl reports what she sees in the future, the report is the movie that follows, and that we see through her eyes. It works for me because then I can ascribe the limits of the vision I see to the character I know shaped it.
 one of my most valued movie experiences is a very early short film. Shucks I see my comment on it here at IMDb is deleted. (If anyone saved it, please send it to me.) Its a dancer with flowing garments that sail with her in space. Over this has been hand painted color that overlaps the boundaries of the fabric, the first spatial artificial effect in film. Its transporting, this century-old image. Its copied in many ways here with the oracle's appearance. She's a drugged young beauty, and they use this as an excuse to have her dance, with smoke, hair, skin and fabric tendrils weaving space, sex, sense, vision. The designers of this scene were used nowhere else that I could tell. Its an extraordinary bit of art.
 There's something inherently cinematic about redheads. All filmmakers know this. Its in many how-to shortcut books. But like other fundamentals, no matter how hackneyed it gets, it can still be effective. In a film of actors whose hair has been blacked to seem Greek (and elsewhere skin darkened to seem "Persian"), they find an Irish girl to play the oracle. I guess she's pretty; it's hard to tell because she's less a person than the provider of hair and a nipple in a complex assembly, but there you have the redhead, first seen doing a Gilda hair introduction.
I saw this in a theater with a friend and despite dangerous political twinges we got swept up in it, together with the people in the auditorium. I think there's an analogy between the brotherhood of the men we see, and the implied brotherhood of the people in the audience. It brought us closer through vision. Film can do a lot worse.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.