Beautifully crafted film but just too "hollywood"...

Rating: 6/10 (16 April 2007)

Yes, I know the fan boys (which I consider myself a member) will howl but I thought this film fell far short of what it could have been.
What I loved: Cinematography, fx, camera direction was incredible. This film was lovingly crafted and shot. I felt like I was not watching the actual battle but living someone's dream they had while listening to the narrator tell of these exploits. What I thought was very average: The dialog was groaningly bad at times but since it was comic book (excuuuuuuse me, graphic novel, ahem) dialog I could get around it. The ninja-like Persian Immortals were cheesy but I could understand since they were supposed to be from the east and this is a soldier's point of view we are hearing. What I thought was awful: David Wenham as Dilios (the narrator) was awful when on screen although not so bad when narrating, he used the "I'm a tough guy raspy voice" and just sounded like a skinny Australian using a tough guy raspy voice.
The historic inaccuracies are legion; Leonides tells his son the strength of the Spartans was the phalanx and then they spent all of 10 minutes actually using the tactic. The one edged swords were a Hollywood contrivance and the Spartans going into battle without their bronze cuirass' would just not have happened (and if a soldier was telling the story to an army he would have expounded on how the superior armor and technology made the Spartan's invincible but for being outnumbered 1000s to 1) Also the roughness of the workmanship of the helms and shields would not have been accepted in the militant society that Sparta was.
But by far the craziest and most grievous error was Leonides expounding on a "free Greece" and how all men should be free. The Spartans were some of the most vicious slavers in the history of man; they literally kept thousands of slaves! They used their slaves as assassination practice targets for their young soldiers among other practices. This is like making a movie about the American Civil War, having no black people in the plantation scenes and then Robert E Lee standing up and giving an abolitionist speech at Appomattox. This glossing over of history was just a terrible disservice to the thousands of innocent human beings who were killed and oppressed by the Spartans.