OK-ish

Rating: 6/10 (25 May 2010)

I quite liked this film. There was little else to it but graphic violence and the battle scenes were suitably gory. The situation should make one sympathise with the Spartans but, paradoxically, I found myself rather wishing the 'baddies' would triumph. Spartan society was pretty hairy by all accounts, hard, uncompromising, women didn't have much of a life, 'weakling' babies exposed to die etc etc. Admittedly the Persians had numbers on their side, but the Spartans were much better armed, with heavy infantry weapons - metal shields, spears and cutting swords while the Persians had lattice-work shields which the spears just went through. In a modern parallel it was brown bess muskets against kalashnikovs. Which, of course, evened things up a bit Re the film, there were some fairly questionable situations, though. I mean, would the traitor who was stabbed by the queen really go into the conference chamber with the actual Persian '30 pieces of silver' stuffed up his jumper? Unless he was mentally challenged in a big way I'd say probably not. Also (a common feature of all 'goodie/baddie' movies), why, when there are 15 baddies wanting to skewer one goodie, do the baddies form an orderly line and obligingly come at him one at a time? Why not all jump on him at once? In terms of the inevitable corpse-count it would seem to be a better policy.
Still, I have say I watched it all the way through with only a minimum of boredom (in the non-fighting bits at least). My fave character? Ephialtes the hunchback, of course - he reminded me of my old woodwork teacher after he'd had an argument with a lathe!