Okay, not great but not terrible

Rating: 6/10 (14 April 2007)

This is a movie version of a graphic novel version of the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans held off a vastly superior Persian army. You don't go to something like this expecting accurate history or geography. Anyone not literate enough to understand this is a highly stylized retelling should do other movie-goers a favor and stay home. And the only way you can come out of this film seeing it as a metaphor for the present Middle East or the War on Terror is to go in already determined to see it that way. As any number of historically informed reviewers have noted, most of the most jingoistic and "rah-rah" scenes in the film are quoted directly from the ancient Greeks who wrote about the battle.
There's tons of action but not much suspense; we know the Titanic will sink and we know the Spartans will be betrayed and overwhelmed. Some of the visuals are unintentionally hilarious. The old priests visited by Leonidas at the start of the film look for all the world like Emperor Palpatine and Xerxes looks so much like one of the Borg I all but expected him to say "Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." And apparently Xerxes had a personal bodyguard of ninjas.
Anatomical discovery of the day: hack off an arm or stab someone in the gut, and blood sprays everywhere. Hack off a head, sever the carotids and the jugulars, and it barely drips.
Even allowing for the stylized story, the historical inaccuracies grate after a while. What's missing more than anything else is why we should care. Persia, to be sure, was an autocratic empire but Sparta was as regimented as North Korea. If North Korea were to duke it out with Iran I'd make a big bowl of popcorn and cheer for both sides as I watched it on TV. Also, the Persian rulers Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes, all mentioned in the Bible, were competent and fairly enlightened rulers. We can be certain Xerxes was not the hermaphroditic freak he's made out to be in this film. Why did the Persians try to conquer Greece in the first place? How could people in Sparta, which was both ultra-militaristic and brutal in its treatment of its children and its slaves, talk about freedom? Obviously "freedom" meant something to them, but what? Why would they identify with other Greeks instead of accepting the Persian offer of overlord-ship? Why would other Greeks identify with the Spartans? Obviously there were complex motivations and modes of thinking that cut across our categories, and the film makes no effort to explore them.
The closing credit graphics are colorful, dramatic, and worth staying for.