Cheap Cds - 300 [2007]

Back to 300 [2007]

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Customer Rating:

Summary: Is it a comedy?
Comment: Is this film supposed to be funny,it must be the worst film i've seen for ages.It's corny and a
little camp.It's so bad that it's funny,probably funnier than meet the spartans.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Forget history
Comment: Forget history, forget politics, forget morality - just take this film for what it is - a cracking
bit of fun!

Customer Rating:

Summary: Only as a warning... NO DTS Soundtrack
Comment: I did not want to say much about the film or the DVD, because both are without a doubt great and
dearly recommended, but the description contains one flaw, cause it claims the DVD would have the
DTS-Soundtrack on it, which it doesn't. I ask for an update on the Features, but untill that comes
through, this has to do.
Blocker

Customer Rating:

Summary: Slightly disappointed
Comment: I saw this film at the cinema and found it slightly disappointing. Seems if you are female then
you'll love this movie for all the hunky men that are in it. However, I do admit to being a bit of a
movie critic and the first let down was how much blue/green screen was used in this movie. Why they
needed to pretty much do the whole movie like this I do not know?

Secondly, for all the
fighting scenes are at first glance awesome, they do lack a lot of detail. Seems that movies these
days to sneak in a 15 certificate, they speed and blur the action scenes which I find ruins it
slightly.

Apart from that it still is a good movie but not as good as it could have
been.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Silly, overblown and artificial but still oddly moving
Comment: '300' is one of those mainstream films that is better the second time you watch it, which is another
way of saying that it's not all that good. We can expect really good, serious films to be tough
going the first time round, because really good directors have a personal way of saying things that
is sometimes difficult by virtue of being unfamiliar.

Zack Snyder, however, is not a
really good director. He's a talented Hollywood director who lucked into a vivid retelling of a
good story, in this case Frank Miller's passionate and visually striking but lurid and inaccurate
version of the heroic-but-doomed defence of the pass of Thermopylae by a small Greek army against a
massive Persian one.

The battle of Thermopylae has been called, with some justice,
the most important battle in the history of what is sometimes called Western civilisation. Although
the Greeks ultimately lost, their collective and determined self-sacrifice helped to boost the
morale of the Greek side, with the result that the Persian empire didn't actually conquer Greece in
478BC but went home to lick its wounds - with the further result that Greek civilisation developed
in the uniquely individual and ornery way that it did, giving us (among other things) the invention
of tragic drama, history and philosophy, plus a lot of really good poetry. Thermopylae was one of
the very few times in history when it was truly necessary for a small cadre of dedicated soldiers to
defend the freedom that others enjoyed.

The film doesn't really work, though, because
it relies almost entirely on the book, which is itself filtered through Frank Miller's rather manic
Orientalism. The Persian king Xerxes, who was in real life a weak, ignorant and over-ambitious
character with a desire to avenge his father's failures, and who was therefore not totally unlike
the current US President, is here presented as a sleazily androgynous giant whose court is full of
lots of same-sex sex. You would never know from this movie that the Spartans practised
institutional pederasty; that all Spartan adolescent boys went through a period of being the lovers
of older men. In the movie, King Leonidas (Gerard Butler, very good, gruff and apparently
channelling Sean Connery) refers to his temporary Athenian allies as 'boy-lovers', which is pretty
ironic seeing as he would have been one himself in real life.

Having said that, the
performances are good. Lena Headey is especially fine as Queen Gorgo, one of the very few ancient
Greek women about whom we have much evidence and who, by most accounts, was very much as we see her
here - blunt, to the point, honourable, determined and courageous. The depiction of the battle
itself is frankly wacky, with eight-feet-tall monsters standing in for the largely conscript Persian
army, but the ultimate emotional significance of the stand at Thermopylae does come across, even if
the film is wildly inaccurate in every detail except the dialogue (e.g. when challenged by the
Persians to lay down arms, Leonidas really is supposed to have replied 'Come and get them.') />
So it's a big fantasy, and if you really want to know what it was like at Thermopylae or
how they came to be there in the first place, I suggest you read a good book on the subject. But
the film, like Miller's graphic novel, does admirably capture what Thermopylae has to come to mean
from almost as soon as it originally happened - heroic self-sacrifice in the name of a good cause.
The Spartans themselves did not practice democracy, and indeed their whole society was built on the
exploitation and enslavement of others. But if they hadn't stood at Thermopylae and made an
example, Western history might have been very different. Benevolent despotism might have been the
only political system we had ever heard of.

Also, there's some great hacking and
slashing. It's not a major film, but it's fun. Just don't take it for anything like accuracy. And
the CGI does get a bit annoying.

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