True to the original, entertaining and visually stunning

Rating: 9/10 (14 June 2007)

Frank Miller made a comic book. It took an actual event -- a suicidal stand of 300 Spartan warriors under the command of king Leonidas against a vast armies of Persian god-king Xerxes -- and transformed it into exaggerated heroic legend. It added cool remarks, cool view angles, cool action sequences, and readers loved it.
This movie is that comic book transformed almost frame-by-frame onto the film; the only change is the addition of a secondary storyline about the king's wife's desperate attempt to get some reinforcements for him.
These events are more than 2000 years old; the people portrayed in there have nothing to do with today Arabians (after all, the "losers" were worshiping their KING as god, not Allah, for god's sake!), nor with "the West" (those "winners" were disposing of weaker children without mercy, after all!). So it's not US against THEM, it's not U.S. against Muslims, and anyone trying to see that parallel in the movie is a stupid warmonger.
The transformation of the comic onto film was superbly done: Same colors, same visually stunning angles. It's much better than Troy, it's much better than Gladiator (in terms of the visual appeal of the fight scenes); the edit cleverly uses "temporal jerkiness" (wow, I wanna trademark on this expression! :-) ) , i.e. slowing and speeding one continuous shot so that you see each kill in slow motion and the "dance" between kills in fast-motion; the CGI of 2006/7 allowed the film makers to create absolutely unbelievable battle sequences that are jaw-dropping.
The secondary storyline seemed to me to be heavily cut; I'd say prolonging some of the scenes of that storyline with a bit more solid background for them (i.e., adding more of "before" and "after" for the scenes) would be good and I think that the extended version will add formidable amount of time to this storyline, as it seemed too brief. It's similar to Gladiator (the Extended version of which I greatly recommend), where in the original cut, certain acts didn't really seem rational, but the extended cut added plenty of "evidence" that justified them.
To sum it up, if you're looking for a historical action, you won't be disappointed. And if you are paranoid and see anti-Whatever-ism in everything, being it The Passion of the Christ or Black Hawk Down, give this movie a break - it's over 2000 years past the events depicted and we do have a brain.