fantastic visual style in every detail and a questionable ideology

Rating: 7/10 (12 January 2008)

While 300 delivers beautiful pictures, the story told and the means chosen follow a rather questionable artistic vision: The characters are either warriors, born, beautiful and eager to sacrifice their life or corrupted.
The Persian emperor Xerxes is shown as the great tempter to corruption just like the biblical devil. This corruption is reflected in physical degeneration to the point that the army of Xerxes largely consists of beasts, cripples and monstrosities.
For example: Some Priests that the Spartan King visits to get a hint what to do by their oracle, are struck by a skin disease and the narrator describes them as old, diseased, inhuman, rotten and finally moral corrupt. One points to the other, from the obvious to the hidden. Of course the priests are in league with Xerxes and deliver deceptive advise.
In opposition to that, the Spartan Warrier Elite are male Superheros with perfect looks and superior faith, prepared for any sacrifice.
This idea of fitness, that (only) in a perfect male body a perfect soul lives, is something that is attributed to the antique Greece. But this idea stands in strong opposition to modern western ideology.
300 is aware of that opposition and this is shown by the struggle of the Spartan Queen at the Heimatfront against the spartan Council. In this Parliament so called politicians are listening to deceptive speeches while the King acts and dies for their freedom. The Queen succeeds only by stabbing her opponent in the Council to death, who has been bribed by Xerxes with gold.
While Western democracy traces its roots to antique Greece democracy, 300 suggests the opposite: That the Greece fought and died to defend their honor and freedom of Kings, holy oaths and sacrifice against a weak system of personal interest and debate prone to corruption.
Western ideology draws a line between beauty and truth, to the point that what is beautiful is considered to be a lie. For us, awful and truth goes together well. For us, truth is a matter of words, not of action. Antique Greece Ideology considered a connection between physical beauty and truth, but the goal of their thinking has been truth as well and they used words to find it. That is one source of western philosophy and culture.
By turning around this relationship between spirit and body, declaring physical beauty and sacrifice a material and therefore only real sign of truth, picturing words as misleading and a means for corruption, 300 cannot convince today. Mankind has 2000 years more experience to know better than that.