The ultimate victory of style over substance

Rating: 3/10 (29 March 2007)

This film looks amazing, unfortunately this is about all that it has going for it. I know that this film is a comic book epic, but this is no excuse for the cringe worthy dialogue, bad acting and banal plot.
The circumstances of the Battle of Thermopylae alone should have been enough to at least convey some sense of sorrow and doom, but the video-game graphics circumvent even this. The Spartans fight as if the perfection of their bodies is enough to overcome even the most impossible of odds. The death of the 300 seems to be something of an afterthought, as if Frank Miller realised too late that these indestructible supermen actually had to die to maintain any semblance of historical accuracy.
This glorification of battle and the body beautiful feels scarily like one of Leni Riefenstahl's efforts. The perfect, white warriors bravely battling the hordes of deformed, dark skinned monsters from the east. One is frankly amazed at the openness of the conflation between the proud heroes of Sparta and the War on Terror, and amused at how ridiculous such a suggestion is to the rational mind.
For all the major flaws of this film, it deserves three stars just for the quality of its design.