Prepare for Glory!! Press the B button for blocking..

Rating: 6/10 (10 March 2007)

After all the excitements and blood thirst implanted in my unconscious by the spectecular trailers, after waiting this movielike a hungry wolf for 3 months, after all that macho egoism I agitated in myself, my expectations rumbled down like that pile of dead in the movie. Admirer of Sparta as I am, born and raised in soils that inspired the stories of Heredot, I was filled with joy when I saw the woman standing in the wheat fields like the symbol of mother nature. My mouth was wide open when I saw the scene of phalanx pushing the others off the cliff against the bronze-like sunlight, like seeing those soldiers on ancient pottery coming into life. But no! That was in the trailer! After I watched the movie, these great feeling subsided. The movie added nothing if not a hair to its trailer. As rythmic and striking the trailer was, boring and out of phase was the movie. I also found out that 70% of the dialogs were already used in the trailer. I did enjoy the story of Spartan boys in the beginning, although the scene with wolf was a little too long, and there could have been several more kids to depict the story. Anyway, the beginning was OK, but after that, the story got more and more incoherent and out of rhythm. There were totally unnecessary scenes like the sex scene of the king and the queen. Later the scene where Leonidas climbed to the oracle was a disaster. The gods sucked. They looked more pathetic than the humpback in the later scenes. There was that absurd scene of the fat Persian guy in the temple. After that when the king he assembled his men infront of the town, I didn't hear any encouraging speeches from the king. Why didn't he tell something like: let's win this war with blood.. at least? The only impressive sentence i heard was the joke he made to the Athenians. Other than that, there wasn't a figure like Spartakus infront of us. The war scenes were OK, but nothing revolutionary or something. It reminded me of Lord of the Rings, although I would have preferred the more realistic Troy style. Overall it was an OK movie, but it didn't agitate me, it didn't make me want to grab a sword and thrash the cars in the parking lot. It didn't inspire heroism in me as in the great Ying Xiong (The Hero). It was nothing comparable to that. Indeed the movie contained obvious racism (cmon now someone has to say it) and stupid remarks like 'defending the age of freedom'. What was that?? Sparta ain't defending nothing other than its own values, which have no relation with the new age (whatever that is). Hey, I love Sparta, I am a macho, and have a moustache, but get real, Sparta is the fantastic city-state of the distant past. It has nothing to do with today, especially democracy, if you are mentioning that. By making Leonidas tell that, they just made Spartans a bunch of sheep rather than wolves, or lions. Anyway, the movie had some good stuff. It was in a different world, closer to computer games', and had some nice battle scenes. I give 10 to the trailer, 6 to the movie.