Leonidas for President!

Rating: 8/10 (14 March 2007)

"300" is a fast, fun, exhilarating, inspirational movie. It's sexy and sick, graphically violent, and a feast of heavily weighted political and religious symbols.
Gerard Butler is stunning to look at -- his body is bulked up and sculpted, and he is completely believable as an ancient Spartan king who happens to have a Scottish accent. In turns Butler looks determined -- when in battle -- loving -- toward his wife -- and amused -- when confronting Xerxes of the excessively tweezed eyebrows.
Yes, the movie is violent -- its name, "300," is made to look as if written in splattering blood, after all. But the bad guys are really, really bad, the good guys are preeeetty good, and the fate of Western Civilization hangs in the balance, so the violence is meant to be in service to a larger, worthy cause.
"300"'s actors performed before green screens, not on three-dimensional sets. The sets were added by computer. Some say that this process results in a fake-looking movie that doesn't engage the emotions. My emotions were so engaged I cried twice.
I had fun at this movie. So much fun I wish I could give it a ten. Instead, I'm tempting to give it a seven.
For all it has going for it, the movie never rises above its comic book roots.
Women? The movie makes a couple of flamboyant gestures toward women: Queen Gorgo gets to say "Only Spartan women give birth to real men," but the movie, in two scenes, panders to the worst in the worst male imagination. There are two scenes where women are violated on camera. It's made clear that there are little boys in Sparta, as well as men, but the movie doesn't say enough about how Spartan women got to be the truly exceptional women they were.
Plutarch reported that the men of Sparta always obeyed their wives. Spartan women married later than other women, in order to ensure healthy births. They could own property, wore clothing that allowed them freedom of movement, and could have more than one husband.
Why, then, does "300," while depicting Spartan men heroically, depict a Spartan girl not so much as swatting away an ephor who abuses her, never mind the ugly fate the film hands its best female character? The movie's dismissal of women is just part of how it refuses to be a full film, rather than just a comic book. That's why it's not a ten.
And then there is the political subtext.
Look, you'd have to be Rip van Winkle not to get the political subtext here, intended or not.
The Greek wars against Persians have long been depicted as an essential battle between Western freedom, democracy, and reason and Eastern tyranny, despotism, slavery, submission, and obscurantism. Leonidas and Xerxes faced off long before the birth of Christ, Mohammed, or Osama bin Laden, but they were laying down the foundation of epochal narratives, narratives we still use to define our lives.
Again, whether intended or not, various features of "300" will be read as part of this millenia-old battle between West and East. Examples: Xerxes and his minions are festooned with chains. The chains echo slavery, the presumed condition against which the Greeks were fighting, and which they repeatedly name as their enemy. Slavery is associated with submission, and submission is the English word for "Islam." Xerxes' troops wear turbans and face veils that are similar to costumes donned by the Taliban today.
Persia is the ancient word for what is today Iran.
Xerxes entertains himself with belly dancers, associated with Muslim countries.
The ephors are made out to be Politically Correct traitors and equivocators, sort of like creepy old college profs.
Etc.
You may not read the film that way, Frank Miller and/or Zack Snyder may not have intended any of the film's imagery that way, but that's how many viewers will read it.
Whatever.
"300" is beautiful to look at, and it's a good time.