"That comic book movie like Sin City with Greeks"

Rating: 1/10 (1 July 2007)

From a visual perspective, 300 is something of a masterpiece. But movies aren't supposed to be visual masterpieces---they're supposed to have decent dialogue, story, and substance to back it up. That is what separates good movies from bad ones that look good.
I've had my months leading up to the movie and afterwards of trashing this movie for not only its historical inaccuracies, but it's ridiculous treatment of basic logic. Nowhere else can you see 300 naked men bellow at two massive elephants and send them toppling off a cliff, or a single naked man kill a charging rhino with little more than a flimsy wooden spear.
Everything in 300 save for a scene with horses was filmed in a warehouse against green or bluescreen, and while it makes for some visual spectacles, it removes a certain grittiness from it that fails to capture the audience and thrust them right in the midst of the action.
Another major failing is the Spartans themselves. The key to any superhero comic movie (because these Spartans can't be human) is for the hero to be endearing to the audience. The director appears to have completely fumbled this, by making the main characters incredibly arrogant, intolerant, and smug, while giving them anachronistic ideals of freedom and liberty (like a Roman Emperor preaching equality for all men) which rather than preach, they bellow at one another.
Rarely does Leonidas say anything that isn't shrieked in the most bellicose manner possible. His lines range in depth and complexity from "SPARTAAAAANS! PUSH!" "SPARTAAAAAANS!! PREPARE FOR GLOOOORY!!" "SPARTAAAANS! WE WILL STAND AND FIGHT!!!" By failing to endear, and arrogance, I refer to several scenes, including when Leonidas first meets Ephialtes. In history, Ephialtes was a normal goat herder or farmer, who betrayed the Greeks by revealing to Xerxes a goat path leading around the pass out of greed. In the movie, he's a horribly deformed monster (akin to a mix of Gollum from LOTR and Joe Merrick, the Elephant Man), with a heart of gold, seeking to prove himself in battle. His effort to hoist a shield and thrust a spear is almost heartwarming in its attempts, yet Leonidas haughtily says that since he can't raise his shield high enough for long enough, he can't fight in a phalanx (which is particularly ironic, since the Spartans never fight in a phalanx in the entire movie save for the first battle---the director Zack Snyder even admitted doing away with the phalanx because it wasn't "cool enough" for his movie), thrusting Ephialtes into a grief-ridden rage which causes him to betray the Spartans rather than help them.
Leonidas also very arrogantly mocks his Phokian allies for not being born to kill like the Spartans are.
A lot of movie cross-over appears to happen, as Ephialtes very much resembles Gollum in Lord of the Rings, so too the Persian Immortals must have been dug up in Isengard, like the Uruk-hai in LOTR---they are not human, and look very much like Orcs. And the "Uber Immortal" as it was so brilliantly labeled, was little more than a thinner, more muscular cave troll.
Whatever humanity is left in the film is squandered for the more machismo audience. Queen Gorgo's role is little more than to look like a frumpy 50 year old housewife, muttering about some incomprehensible thing or other while another Spartan attempts to court her. Before Leonidas leaves, he treats the audience to a sex scene so dull and lifeless that it amounts to little more than a CG dry humping with Gorgo. The end of this subplot culminates in the Spartan who has been flirting with her getting stabbed in the public forum while gold coins fly in the air and everyone bellows "TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR!!!!!"
To the battle scenes: As mentioned above, Zack Snyder admitted to doing away with the phalanx because it wasn't "cool". So rather than attempt to give the audience something new, innovative, and unbelievably bloody and violent, he gives us the same old glorified one-man-army crap we've seen in a dozen action movies. CG or not, there's little innovation or anything to impress with the action scenes. Many times, you're left laughing or shaking your head in disbelief as the fighters go out of their way to look "cool" rather than deadly. One case in particular is when a Persian Immortal has a clear shot at a Spartan, and chooses rather than to stab his naked chest, to drop his weapon and DROPKICK him.
At some point, you get overwhelmed with the Spartans sticking Persians with their spears like hot knives through margarine, and giant waves of bodies keeling onto a wave of Immortals, and quite literally random slow-motion sequences showing off how close a hurled axe cuts Leonidas' helmet plume, or how many rope fibers are at the end of a Persian's whip, or how many beads of sweat drip down the bronzed and chiseled chest of a Spartan. Okay, we get it! You have a 100 million dollar budget to spend on CG and you don't know how to show it off! There's little else going for the movie other than nonstop and often senseless action violence which gets excessive, broken only by the lonely and useless subplot with Gorgo looking frumpy and Spartan #2 forcibly kissing her. Even if you were to look past the unbearably significant historical inaccuracies and the gaping holes in logic (like how 300 Spartans march off to battle without any supplies, no food or water or baggage train, with nothing but their capes, short-shorts, spears, helmets, and shields) it amounts to little more than an action yarn and a visual mess of action and sunset-colored landscape, little else from dialogue and script, acting, even sound, make it distinct in any sort of way. I doubt many people in years to come would remember this as any more than "That comic book movie like Sin City with Greeks"