Not very good

Rating: 5/10 (17 April 2007)

The good...
So I went to the Cinerama in Seattle to watch this and was impressed with the visual effects, the combat scenes and the overall visual feel of the movie. The grainy, almost washed out quality of the film is pretty cool and really worked for me. It helped to make the very gory battle scenes much easier to take and did create some very startling images, especially the ship wreck scene.
The combat scenes were exceptionally well done, kudos to the stunt folks, the CGI artists and the actors for a lot of hard work. And as I mentioned before, the grainy quality of the film really helped make the combat scenes look like they were pulled right from a graphic novel.
The bad...
Dialog/writing/script was terrible...I would rather have put on my Blue Oyster Cult album and listened to it than listen to the horrible dialog in this movie. With the combat scenes Veteran of the Psychic Wars or Cities on Flame would have been way cooler! I swear, if I had to hear the main character yell, "Spartans blah blah blah!", one more time I was going to "...dine in hell" myself.
Story, well...what can you say here? We should all know the story of Thermopylae, or at least some version of it. Historical accuracy? Do not look for it here, this presents the Persians as a bunch of freaks led by a freak against a group of muscular white Greeks with Scottish accents. How that worked out in casting I am not sure but it did, and there you are. All I can say is that at least they did have the 300 Spartans actually die, it kinda surprised me with the way the movie was going :-)
Soundtrack, as I mentioned previously, I would liked to have completely replaced the dialog, and maybe cut out everything but the combat scenes, add some hard rock as the soundtrack and I think it would have improved this movie. Seriously, the soundtrack was unremarkable.
The ugly
Practically EVERY Persian in the film is some kind of deformed freak! Then there is the traitor Greek, he is a deformed hunchback Spartan. Not much guesswork here :-)
Overall: 5 stars, only because of the really cool battle scenes!
If you are looking for a popcorn put your brain on hold enjoy CGI and combat then this is the movie for you. If you are looking for something with a script, good acting and with a story that might surprise and interest you then look elsewhere. Lastly, IMHO this is a very obvious propaganda movie, especially the last few minutes. I mean, come on...