Movie Review: 300

"keifer113@gmail.com":
> postscript: What I think will be amusing is the interpetation that
> will be given to the film in light of today's political stage. I have
> heard that in Europe people walked out on the film because they were
> outraged by the "message", while some people have likened George Bush
> to both Leonidas and Xerxes. I don't believe you can make an issue of
> the story with today's world....you could do the same with Lord of the
> Rings and many other tales.

I figured that 300's politics track closely to those of Heinlein: honour (of
men and women), duty (of ditto), the state as equivalent to society, and the
soldier as the rightful primary caste of the state. Mind you, Heinlein owed
much of his politics to his study of the classics. Full circle.

300 doesn't follow the politics of any party in any modern democracy I know
of; not since Theodore Roosevelt anyway. There are individuals in both
parties who might understand 300; Jim Webb and John McCain come to mind in
the Senate.

I had some major problems with this movie.

-Two of the evil emissaries of the Great King were subSaharan African.
Cambyses, a few decades prior, had been thrown right OUT of Nubia and lost
his life soon after (murder? madness?). Those emissaries gave the movie too
much of a "white power" expression. If the Great King's messengers had to be
exotic, then they should have been high-caste Indian or Central Asian; if
the movie required Africans, then they should have been sneaking gold to the
anti-Persian Greeks.

-The Spartan regime was whitewashed far too much. Steven "Gates of Fire"
Pressfield was able to show warts-n-all; what can't Miller and Snyder?

-The Spartan allies were almost ignored. By now I've grown wearily used to
stories about the "300" which ignore the other 700 Thespians. But editing
Themistocles and all his Athenians out of the Battle of Artemision - which
is a storm in the movie - was just stupid. What if we had a battle and
nobody showed up, indeed. Again, Pressfield was able to keep the focus on
the 300 while giving the others credit where it was due.

-That trope about the Spartans (rather than Athenians and Ionians) fighting
for "reason" against Eastern obscurantism was anachronistic enough the first
time it came up. It became an absolute joke after the Persians brought in
some sparkly firecrackers to launch against the Spartan shields, and the
narrator described it as "sorcery". When they release this movie in China
they are going to fit those scenes with a laugh track.

The movie was pretty to look at, and I suppose we have to start somewhere if
we are to educate our generation in why Thermopylae, and the ancient Greeks
in general, matter to us. But it could have been done so much better.

--
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In article <1173648875.371292.218660.TakeThisOut@c51g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
keifer113.TakeThisOut@gmail.com <Keifer113.TakeThisOut@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think it's a stretch to cast the US as the Spartans and the traitors
>> as our NATO allies. The US wasn't exactly dragged kicking and screaming
>> into an invasion and our elite troops are comprised of our slave caste.
>> If you doubt it then compare the number of recruiters per capita in
>> Scottsdale, AZ to the number in the west valley. (I was going to use
>> Beverly Hills and Compton, but that would have resulted in an
>> unnecessary tangent.)
>
>Slave caste?

I believe he is (a) uncaring of how offensive his terminology might be and (b)
referring to American blacks, who apparently comprise the majority of the
troops in Iraq.
--
"Yo' ideas need to be thinked befo' they are say'd" - Ian Lamb, age 3.5
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~dalamb/ qucis->cs to reply (it's a long story...)