300....(contains a slight spoiler, but this movie is based on a historical battle anyway)

Rating: 4/10 (9 March 2007)

300 comes out today. Will I go see it? Hmmmm...let me think about this one.
NO.
Yes, it's based on a Frank Miller graphic novel, but as was proved with Daredevil, Electra, Batman Forever, and the diamond of all comic book movie flops Batman and Robin, not all comic book premises translate well to the big screen.
From the previews, here is my synopsis of the movie...
Let's take the most famous last stand in history, The Battle of Thermopylae, a true demonstration of sacrifice, courage and strategy, and put the warriors in g-strings! and coppertone tans!!! Then, let's add industrial music and most importantly nymphets and ORCS! LOTS OF ORCCS!!! because we all know that Xerces had orcs fighting for him, right?! Then, there's lots of blood and more blood and gore...probably lots of black orc blood, too, since Jackson got away with it. Oh wait! There are actually orcs in The Lord of the Rings, and the book is a fictional masterpiece. Maybe Miller even threw in some other fictional things, too...like fairies, minotaurs and Merlin. Merlin would be a nice touch! He's from a different time period, but since there's orcs, why not put a fictional wizard in there? That's my synopsis.
Not to spoil it, but it is a bit of history. Leonidas and his army of 300 all die. However, there were more than 300 men fighting with King Leonidas, but who cares about the roughly 7000 men who also fought with the Spartans? Also, there weren't a million Persians, just a mere 150,000, but that's Hollywood. Even so, they were outnumbered by the Persians by about 20 to 1, fought a good fight, held off the army for three days and were eventually defeated.
The movie is a stylized telling of a great moment in history, and it's a shame that it had to be glamorized so much to make it interesting for our culture. I predict that the movie is probably visually spectacular for the first five minutes, and after that, the coppertone just won't shine as brightly.
Whatever you do if you see this film, don't take this as a history lesson. It's entertainment, and not even good entertainment at that. The dialogue is flat, aside the few historical gems, and I have difficulty feeling involved in any of the previews. When the monster is released during the fight against "the immortals," I actually laughed at the idiocy of the scene.