The first Must See of 2007

Rating: 10/10 (9 March 2007)

This movie was amazing. The action scenes were among the best I've ever seen in film, as they actually let you see the action going on instead of that jump cut close-up garbage that is so prevalent these days. Now I've seen a lot of people complaining that the film's not historically accurate and what not and that's because some people missed a crucial point: This is an exaggeration of the Battle of Thermopylae. It nowhere claims to be a historical retelling, it is an adaptation of a graphic novel that is in itself an exaggeration of a legend based on historical fact.
Xerxes isn't gay, he's portrayed as a king who thought himself above the laws of man. He's decadent, arrogant, and a little unstable, which doesn't contradict the very limited historical resources available on Xerxes. The idea was to show that he believed himself to have no moral standard of his own.
Ephialtes is a twisted man on the inside, and so Miller made him appear that way on the outside as well. I don't think there's any place where anyone says "This is what he really looked like!" There are giants and demons, but again, we have to imagine that this is presented as one Spartan's STORY of what happened. And as such, details would be exaggerated for dramatic purposes. So perhaps there were no giants historically, but maybe there were simply large, foreign looking men. To the Spartans, perhaps they seemed monstrous. The same is true with the size of the animals, or the faces of the immortals.
This is the battle through the lens of storytelling. It's exaggerated, it's biased towards the Spartans, as it's a Spartan relaying the story. It never in the context of the film, nor in the marketing for the film, nor in the comic, claims to be an accurate portrayal of what REALLY happened.
And it's a better movie as a result.