Hooah!

Rating: 3/10 (5 December 2017)

The story of Spartan King Leonidas holding the Persian Army of Xerxes at bay at the battle of Thermopylae. As far as I can remember -- I was there but it's been a long time -- it's reasonably accurate historically although perforce some of the dialog must be fabricated.
If it has any redeeming social value it's probably that the kids who are the intended audience will learn that there was once a city called Sparta that wasn't in Mississippi.
But the photography and f/x are something special. Images are in high contrast and tinted a kind of gold except at night, when they're tinted a kind of blue. Not midnight blue but kind of a neon blue.
The acting is professional in caliber. Some of the monsters (for that's how they're depicted) overplay their roles, if that's possible. The women are attractive and it's interesting to see that the queen has been outfitted by Dior or somebody, wearing a dress cut perilously low on her iliac crests. The men are uniformly built. Their pecs are massive. Their abs are rock hard. In fact, they're built almost identically. Can you photoshop a group scene? If it weren't for the photography and f/x it could be a sword and sandal epic from 1958 filmed in Cinecittá starring Lance Sterling (née Guglielmo Gogliucci).
But the photography alone almost redeems the film. The skies are straight out of J. M. W. Turner, smoky and smudged, but slowly swirling.
It's thought provoking but the thoughts it provokes are primitive. There is no overlap between good (white Spartans) and evil (black Persians). This kind of binary thinking is dangerous because it's liable to lead us into believing that this is the way the real world works -- all good versus all evil -- whereas in fact God didn't make the universe in a way that renders it so easy for humans to understand.
Too bad they distilled Spartan culture into nothing more than a lot of heroes taking "drunk delight in battle with my peers." The Spartans certainly fought well and the battle scenes are impressive except when they lapse into very slow motion or are overcranked to lightning speed.
Sparta must have been a nice place to visit though you wouldn't want to live there. They periodically raided their neighbors, the peaceful Helots, for slaves. Older mentors adopted young boys as sexual objects. If a newborn was deformed or otherwise deemed unfit it was put down.