Nice try.

Rating: 6/10 (20 March 2007)

First, let me say that 300 was a good movie.
However, it wasn't a *great* movie.
Our print was grainy (I'm told a hazard of shooting Super 35), and the line between the set and the green-screen effects was painfully obvious. Periodically switching between ancient-inspired music and loud thrash guitar was annoying and distracting.
Flaws in the green-screening aside, the visual design was stunning, there are no two ways about it. Several scenes were not merely inspired by Miller's work, they clearly took extra pains to *duplicate* Miller's art in a moving medium--a daunting task under any circumstances and several times pulled off with staggering precision. The violence--and there's a lot of that, too--is softened a bit by its game-like rendering. The performances were good, and Gerard Butler was magnificently intense as Leonidas.
But.
And let's be absolutely clear about this.
The very last thing that Sparta would have gone to war for was 'freedom'. If you know the slightest history of that era, you know that. And when Snyder and Johnstad and Gordon decided to replace the graphic novel's central theme of 'duty' with 'freedom', they took a movie that I could've easily given an 8 or 9 to, to one that I can in good conscience give no more than a 6.
Dispensing with heavy Spartan armor to emulate the classical Hellenic 'heroic nude' style is one thing: it's stylistic, and is in keeping with the look of the era as passed down by the great sculptor Phidias (a young contemporary of the actual events at Thermopylae, though certainly not there himself) and his even greater successor, Praxiteles.
Dispensing with the entire reason the original 300 (and allies) died is another matter entirely: it's revisionism, nothing more. Sparta was emphatically not a state built on freedom, and had even less interest in preserving their great rival Athens' democracy (with whom Sparta promptly went to war once Persia's invasion was finally repulsed and the Greek peninsula was safe).
Worse, it's the sort of revisionism that weakens the whole story from beginning to end, and reduces what could've been a great movie to a merely good movie.
6/10, and I think it'll look better on your TV than it did on the big screen. Let's watch that matting, guys.