It's not a documentary, it's entertainment

Rating: 7/10 (19 August 2016)

A lot of noise has been made concerning the historical inaccuracies in Zack Snyder's adaptation of the graphic novel 300. But that's totally beside the point. This is not a WW2 documentary, everyone who fought at Thermopylae has been dead for 2,496 years. Both earlier historical war films Braveheart and Gladiator were crtiticised for their historical inaccuracies.
But while witnesses were present during the battles of those films, Herodotus never saw Thermopylae. He wrote about it years after the fact from unreliable sources, and then some Hollywood jackass wrote the movie script for "The 300 Spartans" in the '60s.
Comic book writer (And outspoken Islamaphobe) Frank Miller wrote and illustrated the graphic novel the film is based on after having seen "300 Spartans". Miller has been notoriously rabid in recent years for his anti Islamist views, which he pumped into his book, despite the fact that the Persians in 480BC lived almost 1000 years before Muhammad.
Then Snyder made a film based on the most convoluted game of history's Chinese whispers ever played. Not to mention that the narrator of the film (David Wenham) is a biased Spartan commander, whipping up his war hungry fellow warriors into a battle frenzy with exaggerated tales of Persian monsters. In defense of the film's portrayal of Xerxes, no contemporary portraits of the king were made, so no one really knows what he looked like. For all we know, he may have looked like an 8 foot tall Rodrigo Santoro, wearing more gold than Mr T.
The film is actually comparitively close to the events recorded, unlike the more recent (and rubbish) 300: Rise of an Empire, which is more He Man than Herodotus. I have a few complaints though. The portrayal of Ephialtes as a hunchback is cartoonish. The ephor's line to Leonidas " This is August, Leonidas..." is laughably anachronistic, considering that Roman Emporer Augustus (After which the month was named) wasn't even born for roughly 350 years. But I admit it's a nitpick.
The 300 Spartans in the film die just like Herodotus said. The details may have been changed, but the important beats are surprisingly close to Herodotus. And Gerald Butler kicks ass, even if he sounds more Scottish than Spartan. In short, it's a movie, if you want a serious documentary, watch Discovery Channel.