300

It may not be historically accurate like Gladiator, but it succeeds on much better violence, visuals, music, run-time, and some fantastic action. The film is about this brave and fearless leader Leonidas going through each empire in each battle to rule the final one and rain supreme. Throughout this flick you will find some weird and strange things going on. Because there are some herpes looking gremlins licking a beautiful goddess or a Gollum-like creature with a huge lump on his back. And unlike Gladiator which had a dragged out and depressing ending. After you finish the movie; during the end you see the most satisfying semi-win ever. Leonidas goes on his knees and completely fools king Emissary, and all of the remaining Spartans fight through the final empire. They unfortunately don’t make it but the king throws his spear and scraps king Emissary badly. Afterwards, all of the arrows start flying in the sky and king Leonidas takes his defeat and semi-win like a true warrior. All of the scenes in this movie are intriguing and never drag out which is one of my favorite things in this film. It always has something new and interesting going on, and the scenes that are long are so entertaining. The artistic direction is through the roof with colorful, grim and a great mixing of blood, gore and overall violence. The set pieces like the wall of dead people, the tactic of chopping up arrows on a shield, and the iconic “THIS IS SPARTA” are all super creative and stand out as an interesting combination of superb filmmaking. Other amazing positives like the camera shots help the immersion and battles that take place. The beautifully orchestrated varied tones, and the voice acting being really great and super entertaining. This movie officially earns my very first standing ovation for a 10/10 masterpiece of filmmaking.

Writer/artist Frank Miller took some liberties with the historical record in 300’s comic book retelling, and Zack Snyder carries those exaggerations still further in this filmed adaptation. Though the opposing hordes may be impossibly gigantic and a few names, dates, quotes and actions have been misattributed, the key talking point of the battle of Thermopylae remains untouched. Staring down an irresistible force (aka the collective international armies of the invading King Xerxes), a small contingent of born-and-bred fighters uses one simple tactical advantage to position themselves as the proverbial immovable object. Beyond all the bearded bravado and bare-chested badassery, that’s what this really boils down to: pride and defiance to the bitter end, with enough doses of ferocious battlefield exuberance to prove they really mean it. In his second directorial effort, Snyder paints with as much flair as he can muster. Every line of dialogue is read like a boast, barked with charismatic certainty; each large-scale battle devolves into a string of gratuitous full-page spreads given motion. A slow-mo smorgasbord of blood, guts and glory, rendered with the director’s characteristic brew of brown grime and spatter. These scenes of wanton violence and balletic motion are the film’s crux, a heady mash of SFX sizzle so fluid and cool, we’re (mostly) convinced to ignore how soundstagey it all feels. Condensed into an action-packed third act, the war scenes play like a thirty-minute Nine Inch Nails video, all dirt and gloom and bad intentions. Stacked one after the other in a literal death march to identify the last man standing, they hit with the same might as a Rocky title fight. Shallow, but stirring, action movie wizardry. I didn’t remember how long it took to wade through the exposition and get to this, the good stuff. Turns out it’s quite a while. There’s plenty of visual flavor in that slow build to combat, between the beautiful oracle’s pornographic gyrations and the righteous king’s meme-friendly kicks into infinity, but this is where we really notice the lack of substance. Even a full slate of premium TV actors, plus Michael Fassbender (in his cinematic debut), struggle to pull meaning and individuality from their roles. Some characters may be a little more conniving, or arrive in a different shape, but they’re all essentially different facets of the same person. And the collective tone is so one-note - a whole society with faces pressed grimly into the icy wind - that it starts to feel overwhelming. Miller’s been lucky to inspire such loyal adaptations. Both 300 and the Sin City movies leapt, virtually unblemished, from page to live action, evidently using the source material as storyboards. The resulting visual identity serves as a gust of fresh air for mature comic fans and edgy cinephiles alike, but the plots' mutual tendency to embrace and encourage the profane is a weakness. Adult-oriented storytelling is one thing, but Miller’s properties are so intentionally, gleefully vulgar, it can be tough to take them seriously. He doesn’t just push the envelope, he shoves it into interstate traffic. That can be fun, and frequently is when 300 is humming along at full throttle, but can also be deeply exhausting. I needed relief, but Snyder and company just kept doubling down. Epic cinema at its best, but also trite, drawn-out buffoonery at its worst. I liked more parts than I didn’t.

Slow but sure people will forgot their bastard and start questioning why we in war? Time will tell everthing and never wrong

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

“300” is about as violent as “Apocalypto” and twice as stupid. Adapted from a graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, it offers up a bombastic spectacle of honor and betrayal, rendered in images that might have been airbrushed onto a customized van sometime in the late 1970s. The basic story is a good deal older. It’s all about the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, which unfolded at a narrow pass on the coast of Greece whose name translates as Hot Gates. Hot Gates, indeed! Devotees of the pectoral, deltoid and other fine muscle groups will find much to savor as King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) leads 300 prime Spartan porterhouses into battle against Persian forces commanded by Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), a decadent self-proclaimed deity who wants, as all good movie villains do, to rule the world. The Persians, pioneers in the art of facial piercing, have vastly greater numbers — including ninjas, dervishes, elephants, a charging rhino and an angry bald giant — but the Spartans clearly have superior health clubs and electrolysis facilities. They also hew to a warrior ethic of valor and freedom that makes them, despite their gleeful appetite for killing, the good guys in this tale. (It may be worth pointing out that unlike their mostly black and brown foes, the Spartans and their fellow Greeks are white.) But not all the Spartans back in Sparta support their king on his mission. A gaggle of sickly, corrupt priests, bought off by the Persians, consult an oracular exotic dancer whose topless gyrations lead to a warning against going to war. And the local council is full of appeasers and traitors, chief among them a sardonic, shifty-eyed smoothy named Theron (Dominic West, known to fans of “The Wire” as the irrepressible McNulty). Too cowardly to challenge Leonidas man to man, he fixes his attention on Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), a loyal wife and Spartan patriot who fights the good fight on the home front. Gorgo understands her husband’s noble purpose, the higher cause for which he is willing to sacrifice his life. “Come home with your shield or on it,” she tells him as he heads off into battle after a night of somber marital whoopee. Later she observes that “freedom is not free.” Another movie — Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s “Team America,” whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of “300” — calculated the cost at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that “300” aspires to become. Its digitally tricked-up color scheme, while impressive at times, is hard to tolerate for nearly two hours (true masochists can seek out the Imax version), and the hectic battle scenes would be much more exciting in the first person. I want to chop up some Persians too! There are a few combat sequences that achieve a grim, brutal grandeur, notably an early engagement in which the Spartans, hunkered behind their shields, push back against a Persian line, forcing enemy soldiers off a cliff into the water. The big idea, spelled out over and over in voice-over and dialogue in case the action is too subtle, is that the free, manly men of Sparta fight harder and more valiantly than the enslaved masses under Xerxes’ command. Allegory hunters will find some gristly morsels of topicality tossed in their direction, but you can find many of the same themes, conveyed with more nuance and irony, in a Pokémon cartoon. Zack Snyder’s first film, a remake of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” showed wit as well as technical dexterity. While some of that filmmaking acumen is evident here, the script for “300,” which he wrote with Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon, is weighed down by the lumbering portentousness of the original book, whose arresting images are themselves undermined by the kind of pomposity that frequently mistakes itself for genius. In time, “300” may find its cultural niche as an object of camp derision, like the sword-and-sandals epics of an earlier, pre-computer-generated-imagery age. At present, though, its muscle-bound, grunting self-seriousness is more tiresome than entertaining. Go tell the Spartans, whoever they are, to stay home and watch wrestling.