Completely Amazing!

Rating: 10/10 (25 March 2007)

Ya know what?? Forget about historical accuracy or realism. "300" has little of that. But it doesn't matter. This is an amazing work of art. Yes, it's a violent work of art, but it's incredible nonetheless.
I found practically every shot visually stunning. The color choices, the flow of movement, the camera angles, all overlayed with majestic music, this film is one of the most fantastic visual/audible experiences I've seen on film in quite a while. This is the first western film I've seen that truly emulates the majesty of such Oriental visual classics as "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers". It's absolutely brilliant.
I think that, as a society, we've completely forgotten that film is a visual medium. That's a very odd thing to say, but it's true. When one really wants to create artistry on the screen, one has to remember film is really a canvas, a bare receptacle ready for whatever one wants to throw at it.
Most filmmakers want to tell a story and put that story on the screen. And that's fine. But all they are really doing is putting that story into life (i.e. real actors in real settings), and simply using the camera to capture that story for show on a screen. Sure, that can work fine (witness Stephen Spielberg and other great filmmakers).
But what Yimou Zhang does with his fantastic films, and what Robert Rodriguez, Zack Snyder, and Frank Miller have done with "Sin City" and "300", is actually craft visual masterpieces directly for the screen itself. They aren't simply taking pictures of a story, they are actually crafting directly for the projection screen at your Googleplex Cinema.
This difference between capturing an image, and CRAFTING an image, is understood by world-renowned, artistic photographers, and it is my hope films such as "300" will help spread this understanding among filmmakers.
Oh, and the film has lots of beheadings. Gotta love beheadings.
10 out of 10.