Mostly blood and guts with a little dialog thrown in

Rating: 1/10 (8 April 2007)

It's rare for me to see a movie who's IMDb.com voting average is over 7.0, and not love it. With reviews averaging 8.0, and both my teenage girls loving it (they saw 300 before me), I thought it would be great - maybe a some interesting history, maybe some great characters, or plot. But nope - just 2 hours of gratuitous blood and guts. And I do mean blood and guts.
Gerard Butler did a good job of acting at King Leonidis, but the way the story is put together and presented, when he shouts that they are fighting for freedom, it could have been anything - fighting for gold, or fighting for glory. It didn't seem to matter.
Some of the special effects are well done - the enormity of the armies and the scenery. If you like blood and guts, this too was well done.
Technically, I didn't care for the color rendering. It looked like the whole film was adjusted in photoshop to be half-way between true color and sepia, maybe to give it an old-time feel.