Popcorn all the way; Perhaps a speculative production?

Rating: 7/10 (28 March 2007)

Weren't the trailers amazing? This was what I was hoping for from 'Gladiator' - fun. Sorry, I meant to say FUN (and elephants in armour)! This is as close as anybody's going to get to a return to the beautiful heyday of eighties actioners.
There's sex, and you get to see a (gasp!) nipple or two. What happened to movie sex? Pansied away by nay-sayers, moralistic bigots and religious zealots, 300 shows that it's still okay for a film aimed at the 18-30 male demographic to have sex, violence and sweaty men. Oh, and some more violence. And a bit just then. And another slo-mo, flying camera massacre...
Towards the end, excitement starts to wane as you realise you've already seen arms, legs and heads chopped off (all very prettily of-course). Forgivable in a movie that means for you to say "Hey, i've seen so much gore i'm numb to it now - Wow, the film-maker's must've meant for me to feel this way", but a little more like overkill in this film. Whilst I was in this fugue, I considered something else that had been bugging me.
This film wriggles. Wriggles all over the place - allow me to explain. The digital process that pretty much all of the shots have gone through has affected the movie as a whole (IMHO), in a bad way. Imagine a filter over every scene that tries to mask/blend the combination of VFX and live-action. Now imagine that that filter is digital, and can behave in any way the producers like. To try to replicate the effect of 'coarse' film stock, giving the film a grittier feel, blocks of colour in the background have a constant live (I prefer the term 'wriggling') pixel effect that draws your eye away from the foreground. Per the title of this comment, I imagine it might have something to do with the massive saleability of a digitally produced film in the new HD formats - with any luck, this will look amazing on a smaller Hi-Def screen.
Technicalities aside, 300 is exactly what it looks like. A film about sweaty, washboard bellied men fighting heroically. The film-makers don't care about historical accuracy, appropriate languages, or political correctness in this film, and neither do I. The handsome men fight and die. The beautiful women have sex. The deformed outcast... well, you'll see.