Some good creative material, but too derivative, too repetitive, and too long

Rating: Null/10 (7 August 2011)

This could have been very good, but in the end it fails. The comic book "feel" is fairly well done but after two hours of numerous artistic and technical flaws, it's just tedious.
Its supposed to be part of a "graphic novel" or "comic book" genre, and there is some really spectacular artwork. Scenes like villagers nailed to a tree, ambassadors thrown down a bottomless well and lurid battle scenes are well done. Horrifying, yet compelling.
But the battle scenes are repeated again, and again, and again, with long slow-motion sequences. From the time the Spartans reach the Hot Gates, Snyder just keeps hitting us with the same stuff. In "Sin City" he spends down time developing the characters so viewers can recharge their interest, but that doesn't happen in 300.
And so much of this is unoriginal. Many scenes are all-too-obvious rip-offs from Gladiator (note the wheatfield pathos scenes), Braveheart, Troy, any Kurosawa film (ninjas masquerading as Persian immortals!), and Lord of the Rings - many Persians seem to be copied from orcs and they even bring a large misshapen bald creature who could have stepped straight from Balin's tomb. I was waiting for Sean Bean to step forward and proclaim "They have a cave-troll"!
There are also logical errors which distract the viewer – these don't matter if covered with deft direction or scripting (as Shakespeare does so often) but Snyder doesn't manage it. Leonidas tells the deformed Ephialtes that he can't be a Spartan because they fight together in formation; yet for almost the entire movie the Spartans fight widely dispersed! And the blood – okay, I can cope with gallons of blood being shed yet never a drop or smear of it on the ground; but when you can actually see the blood vanishing as it reaches the ground, its just a distraction. It doesn't do anything for the story or the "comic book effect".
And in a film with such heavy use of CGI, surely they could have blanked out Gerard Butler's dental fillings and Lena Headey's rubella vaccination scar?!
This is also a film where historical inaccuracy detracts from the experience. Its not a generic period film like "the Vikings" or "Ran", but consciously aspires to being a re-telling of actual events. So its all the more maddening that the producers get just about every historical detail wrong! The list is endless, but here are a few: * Thermopylae was not just defended by 300 Spartans, but by 10,000 Greeks, who all did as much frontline fighting as the Spartans. * After the Persians turned their flank, 1,000 Greeks decided to stay and die in order to cover the withdrawal of the rest – less than one third of these were Spartans. * The bit where a Spartan derides the Athenians as "boy lovers" is hilarious (Spartans were as much into that sort of thing as any other Greeks of the time)! * Showing ephors as deformed pederastic priests is just bizarre – they were actually respected retired warriors and leaders. * The Persian Empire did not send any envoys to Sparta before Thermopylae; the well-throwing incident occurred ten years previously and did not involve Leonidas, * The Persian Empire in general treated its subjects far better than the Spartans treated their subjects (perioiki and helots), and Spartans did not believe in "freedom" in any sense we would recognise today. * Greek hoplites of this period did not throw their spears * The Persian invasion force was eventually defeated in a sea battle, not the land battle at Plataea.
The problem is that you don't need to be a history buff to know this – plenty of children study these things at school. My son's class were warned by their teacher not to take anything in this film seriously if they watched it!
Verdict: just too many problems to sustain this over 2 hours – 3/10