Useless

Rating: 6/10 (11 March 2007)

This movie is a big disappointment. It was the ultra cool trailer that attracted me, and probably many more like me, to the theater. But after the screening, I felt extremely let down.
Following are the reasons: 1) Story: This is the biggest problem in the movie. For a war movie, the absence of a story could be the biggest flaw. It fails to engage a viewer, who would quickly tire out of the grand battle scenes laid before him. In 300, there is no story. It is a simple tale of an extremely brave kingdom of extremely macho men having gorgeous women who would die to save their honor. The USP: 300 against one million, and thats the only thing to the movie.
2) Screenplay: I am sure a lot of moviegoers would know each and every generic motivational dialog that appears in a movie like this. "Men, tonight we die in hell..." and many dialogs like this are derivatives of the similar dialogs in a lot of other movies. There is an overdose of such scenes. Over and above this, it is a straight forward story telling, which makes it extremely predictable.
3) Editing: I bet by showing scenes in normal motion instead of slow motion would shorten the movie's length by a good 10-15 minutes. That is the extent to which slow motion has been used in this movie, practically in every other scene. That was stupid, and not cool. It was good to watch in a few scenes, then it took away the interest.
4) Trailer: Yes, it was super cool. But it had two flaws: One it set the expectations so high that the final product could not meet them. And two, it actually had probably 90% of the cool scenes in the movie. Those scenes were so heavily implanted in the viewers mind that one could anticipate them coming in the movie. There was no surprise package, as far as being cool was concerned.
5) Characters: They were half baked. As simple as that. If there is a fine line between courage and stupidity, by their actions and their values, the characters were unable to clearly justify which side of the line they were on. One time the narrator says there is no place for emotion in Sparta, and yet when someone else's son dies, he goes into this huge cycle of melodrama. The queen does not achieve anything by offering herself to the politician, and yet she was presented as if she was intelligent in doing what she was doing.
My final reaction after coming out of theater.. WHATEVER..