300 (movie)

[MikeH]

Originally posted by Keygen


Actually modern historians estimate they were 6.000-10.000 and not only Spartans but from several other Greek city states as well.

Yes, but only 300 of the 6-10,000 were Spartans, and they were in command.

[LordShiva]

In the movie, there were actually 302 Spartans

[Sprayber]

The only thing I really didnt like that when Xerxes was shown I thought I was watching a stargate movie and the Goauld had landed.

[DinoDoc]

I thought I was the only one to notice that.

[Grandpa Troll]

I really enjoyed it, loved the line when the Queen finished addressing the Council, she told the creep as she stabbed him "I am not your Queen and this wont be quick and you wont enjoy it"

or something like that

How bout that hunchback, reckon he smelled something when Xerses told him he could have anything he saw if only he bowed down?

Otherwise awesome movie

[Saras]

War Nerds take on the movie

http://www.exile.ru/2007-March-23/war_nerd.html

Triumph Of The Vile
Or: 300 Bottles Of Idiocy On The Screen
Gary Brecher

By Gary Brecher ( war_nerd@exile.ru )


FRESNO, CA -- Well, I did it, took one for the team, jumped on the grenade, offered my belly to the bayonets--in other words, sat through 300, the comic-book movie about Thermopylae. The only reason this thing got made is that it makes good anti-Iran propaganda, because as every war fan knows, at Thermopylae "300 brave Spartans held off the entire Persian army."

Zack Snyder's movie is the "Hoo-ah!" version of this story. Every time the Spartan king Leonidas makes a "rousing speech," his warriors yell "Hoo-ah!" like the Rangers in Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down. Actually the Spartans had a rep for silence, but we're not dealing with great historical minds here.

What had me really wanting to puke is that this movie tries to make Sparta into some kind of Land of Hallmark Card-givers. There's about an hour's worth of perfume-ad scenes where Leonidas and his lovey-dovey wife, a feisty lady in one of those bondage-lite Greek dresses, cuddle and make eyes at each other and say patriotic stuff by way of foreplay. Yeah, that's why you see those bumperstickers, "Sparta was for lovers."

Fact: Sparta was about as romantic as North Korea. Give or take a little egalitarianism, Sparta WAS North Korea. Spartan laws did everything they could to break down the family. Sparta was more anti-nuclear family than any Hollywood liberal could ever be.

Wanna know what a Spartan wedding night was really like? It's pretty hilarious, in an insane way. As soon as a Spartan girl got her first period, they grabbed her, shaved her head, dressed her as a boy, threw her down on her new husband's bed, and then, well, he had his way with her. What way was that? Since hubby had been in an all-male dorm since age seven, I'm betting that that night of lovin' was more like a skinny white boy's introduction to San Quentin after lights-out than it was like a chick flick. So when this movie shows the Spartan hero saying to his wife, "Goodbye, my love," I just had to laugh.

No Spartan ever told his wife he loved her. That would've been like treason, because the Spartan rulers wanted family ties snapped, so the only bond left was to the state. They left room for folks' natural urges by letting the women drink, which they did non-stop, and the men form what you might call close comradely bonds with their fellow soldiers.

In the ancient world, gay was a matter of who was on top. If you were a topper, that was fine; if you were the one getting in the ass, not so cool. In other words, prison rules. Sparta's leather-bar ways were a running joke to the ancient Greeks. The Spartans were stone killers - but they also preened like teenage girls before a battle. They grew their hair long, and before a fight they'd comb it, oil it, try out fetching new styles, put little baubles in their ears, anything to die young and leave a beautiful corpse.

None of that in this movie. Just the opposite. The script even has Leonidas taunt the Athenians calling them "boy-lovers." Athens, the true hero of the war against Persia, gets dissed time and again in this movie. You won't hear a word in 300 about Salamis, the real decisive battle of the war - because it was Athens, not Sparta, that destroyed the Persian fleet at Salamis. The Spartans wanted to run away from the Persian fleet and wall themselves off in the Peloponnese (you wouldn't believe how many times I've messed up the spelling on that damn word). They didn't have a clue about combined-arms operations (which the Athenians handled durn well). In fact, the Spartans, who are called "the finest soldiers in history" over and over in this movie, were a mediocre, one-dimensional, inflexible military force.

Sparta understood only one kind of fighting: land battle, the hoplite shield-wall - a Big Ten offense from the old school, "three yards and a cloud of dust." In any shield-wall vs. shield wall battle, the bigger offensive line will break the opposing team's wall, leaving them open to massed spear thrusts. Once the opposition's wall was broken, the citizen-soldiers would scatter to fight another day - a totally sensible reaction, since the alternative was annihilation. In battles like that, psycho varsity offensive-line types like the ones Sparta bred did just fine. But vary the conditions of battle in any way, and they were as helpless as Woody Hayes' Ohio State teams were against a team that could stop the run.

So it was actually fairly easy to stymie the Spartans: just put them in a situation where they had to think for themselves. Imagine a Spartan army up against a Mongol scouting force. Even if the Spartans outnumbered the Mongols by, say, 4-1, I'd have no hesitation betting on the Mongols. They were truly tough, not artificially hardened by sick PE games but by life in the saddle, on the steppes. And they were smart enough to realize that smarts count on the battlefield, that negotiation and alliance-building, scouting and propaganda are all important aspects of war. Only amateurs are dumb enough to think that being dumb, mean and inflexible like the Spartans is the route to military success.

The Thebans under a really brilliant general, Epaminondas, crushed the Spartans in the battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.) because Epaminondas just plain out-thought those lummoxes. He knew exactly how the Spartans would stack their forces in battle order, because they always did it the same way. So he tinkered with the conventional phalanx-stacking set-up and those Thebans, most of them ordinary Greek citizen-soldiers, mere amateurs by Spartan standards, kicked Spartan ass right down the line. The Helots, the locals the Spartans had enslaved and terrorized for generations, finally got a chance for payback and Sparta withered away to nothing. Game over.

Only amateur fascists admire Sparta guys; they're still pissed off because people like me dared to warn them the Iraq war was going to be a disaster. Now the neocons have gone so over the deep end of delusional thinking that they've resorted to fantasizing about Sparta, where nobody ever argued, where everyone yelled and stabbed and otherwise kept their mouths shut.

It's downright hilarious the way this movie punishes every smart character. Every time someone wants to argue with the war party in this movie, he's evil. Everybody who talks in a normal tone of voice is evil. Snyder shows two scenes where the Spartans murder Persian envoys arriving under a flag of truce. And both times, you're supposed to cheer.

Since when do Americans cheer when truce parties are murdered? Well, that's pretty easy to answer, actually: since Iraq. These diehard neocons have gone insane because there's no way they can argue for an invasion of Iran any more. But they still want it, bad. So they've taken a crash course in fascism, jumping all the way to cheering for Sparta and booing for Athens - because Athens stands for brains and flexibility and talking things out. They can't win the argument, so they want to kill anybody who tries to argue. That's why Leonidas kicks the Persian envoy down a well.

The film only approves of two things:

1. Yelling

2. Bashing.

I say "bashing" because you can't call his view of military operations "strategy" or even "tactics." It's just close-ups of Leonidas's teeth while he yells about "freedom." He talks about "freedom" non-stop. I'm serious. A Spartan! Talking about freedom! Leonidas actually says, and this is a quote, "Freedom isn't free"! I thought I was back watching Team America: "Freedom isn't free/It costs a dollar ninety-three..."

And since the ham playing Leonidas has this thick Scottish accent, and teeth like an old horse, it was like some Clydesdale doing an impression of Mel Gibson in Braveheart at the same time. Left me woozy, I tell ya.



But here's what's really interesting about Leonidas's "freedom" speeches: every one happens just after he's thrown some envoy down a well or stabbed somebody who advocates talking strategy. That's the real fantasy here: wouldn't it be great if we could just yell "Hoo-ah!" non-stop and just kill the naysayers? You can almost see the pitiful dweebs behind this movie jacking off every time his musclebound Spartan hero kills another envoy or politician. That'll shut'em up!

Well, it might be fun but it's not war, fellas. If there's one thing we shoulda learned from Iraq, it's that in asymmetrical war, the following items are totally useless, in fact worse than useless, because they get in the way:

1. muscles

2. "Hoo-ah!"

3. killing anybody who points out the flaws in your plan.

Contrary to what amateur fascists think, the really successful military elites encourage discussion, train mid-rank officers to react independently, and discourage yelling, steroid use and macho bull**** in general. Hell, even the Wehrmacht was filled with calm, polite and cultured men. We could use a few of them now.

Petraeus seems kind of like that, but by this time the situation's so awful I'm not sure how much he can do. At least maybe it'll shut up all the "Hoo-ah!" jocks, make them realize they're not fit for theater command, and get them back to their true calling: coaching high-school football. In this movie's case, Junior Varsity.

[Drake Tungsten]

"Freedom isn't free/It costs a dollar ninety-three..."

What a dumbass. Freedom costs $1.05...

[Rufus T. Firefly]

That is freaking hilarious, and actually captures alot of what I felt about the movie -- and I'm about as far from a war nerd as you can get.

All he left ouut was how irritating it was to see LOTR pastiched again and again.

Sure was pretty, though.

[BeBMan]

War Nerd

[VetLegion]

I just finished, ahem, "acquiring" 300, and to my disgust I discover that I have acquired some movie about snowboarding renamed "300" by some prankster

Tenth circle of hell is reserved for those who share fake movies

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by VetLegion
Tenth circle of hell is reserved for those who share fake movies

Serves you right.

[Ming]

***bump***

[Alexander I]

aneeshm's 300 opinions +1

[aneeshm]

Two days back, I went to watch the movie "300". Here are my opinions on it:

Coming as I do from the country which:

a) Is home to the "Last of the Persians" (the Parsees of Mumbai, the last people to have preserved intact the culture of Achaemenid Persia (they still give themselves names like Xerxes and Cyrus))
b) Is a sister culture to the Persia depicted in the movie (both share a common cultural root, and are based on the concept of Aryan culture)


I must say that I am rather disturbed by the movie.

I'll give my reasons one by one.

The first is the historical inaccuracy.

Now I know that many people will counter with "It's based on a goddamn COMIC BOOK, just enjoy it, it's not supposed to be real". My point is not that.

You know that it is based on a comic book. I know that it is based on a comic book. Most people on forums discussing it will know that it is based on a comic book. But does the common man in India who watches it know that?

I went to watch the movie with a good friend of mine, quite cultured and knowledgeable about history, but who had never taken much of an interest in the histories of Greece and Persia, and their interaction.

He came away believing that it was the truth. It took me some time to explain to him that the movie had got all the details ass-backwards, that it was the Persians who were lovers of freedom when compared to the Spartans, that the Persians were not monsters, that they were a noble people who shared much with our own India.

And this is the impression which was carried away by one who is quite intelligent.

Now imagine the image the common man of India, who knows not much of his own history, much less that of two empires only distantly connected with India in time and space, will form of Persia and her people.

At least the makers of the movie could have had the decency to add a disclaimer somewhere at the beginning of the movie that it was not true to history.

The second is the total hypocrisy

I was aghast when I saw the Spartan king throw the Persian messengers into the well, and when this was shown as a good thing.

In one of our epics, the Ramayana, the spy-***-messenger from the good side, sent into the territory of the bad side, is caught by the bad ones. He has caused quite a bit of damage to some state property. The villain of the piece, Ravana, wants to kill him for his insolence.

But his ministers and his own brother are shocked at the suggestion, and tell him that such a thing would be an abomination, unthinkable, and that he should not entertain such a thought. Finally, Ravana relents, and instead chooses to punish the messenger for the damage he has caused (the messenger being a half-human, half-monkey, the punishment is that his tail hair will be set on fire), but that he will be allowed to go back.

Even the greatest villain of our epics, written long before this Sparta thing happened, did not kill a messenger. And we have the Spartans, supposedly from the "Good Side", arrogantly killing the messengers the Persians sent them. And that is then portrayed as good! Absolutely shocking, and totally immoral and adharmic behaviour is condoned here!

And the Spartans lecturing the Persians about freedom is like the British lecturing Mahatma Gandhi about non-violence. Sparta was a society which consisted of professional soldiers, who had to be professionals in order to keep under their control the helots and serfs. The so-called "free men" never did a day's worth of productive work in their lives. They were legally debarred from doing any trading or agriculture.

The reason Sparta was so militaristic was because it was necessary to keep the serfs and helots in line, or they would revolt. And they did frequently revolt, and had to be put down repeatedly and mercilessly.

How people from such a society can talk of freedom and other values like that, when they did not actually practice any of them, is beyond me.

Completely, totally, and unbelievably hypocritical.

The third is the demonisation and dehumanisation of the Persians

No matter which way you slice it, the Persians are shown as a monstrous culture and people. Even though it may be from the point of view of the Spartans, this fact remains.

And also the fact that this is the impression that the audiences here in India carried away from this movie. They really believed that the Persians were like that.

There are roughly 60,000 Persians - yes, the same Persians who were shown to be demons in the movie - living in India today. Imagine you were one of them, and went to watch the movie. Now imagine how you would have felt.

Xerxes and others of the Achaemenid line are the heroes of these people. These are the people who fled the Islamic invaders, and settled in India, bringing their ancient culture to her sister, their only protector left in the world. They even brought the ashes of their fire temples, to maintain ritual continuity with their old fire temples, in which a fire continuously burns to this day - a fire which has never gone out for over a thousand years. Just because a culture is dead or nearly dead does not mean that you go and do to it what has been done in the movie.

In India, with the passage of time, the villains of our epics were progressively demonised over time. But in spite of all that, we still had the decency to acknowledge their greatness. Ravana, though a bad person, is still praised for his piety, for his composition of the great prayer to Shiva, the Shiva Tandava Stotram, for his contributions to the science of medicine.

And not only that, but Persian culture is shown in unimaginably horrible terms. The man with saws or blades for hands? The wanton killings? The sexual perversions? All this, and much more? For a culture which has given the world so much, to which all of us are so indebted? To a culture which was the first to have a universal charter of rights? To one of the first to give religious freedom to its inhabitants?

And the portrayal of Xerxes. The Persian king was always a figure of nobility, and nothing at all like what he was shown. Imagine how you would feel if one of your cultural heroes was shown in such a horrible light. Imagine how the few hundred thousand real Persians left in the world must feel right now, seeing their hero shown in such a way.

And the denigration of their religion. Zoorastrianism is one of the noblest religions in the world. They are essentially fire-worshippers. They use fire as a representation of Ahura Mazda, the force for good. According to them, the world is a battle-ground, where Ahura Mazda constantly fights Ahriman, his eternal enemy, in the ever-continuing fight between good and evil, and that we are fighters, and have to decide on which side we fight. This mirrors very closely the Indian concept of Dharma, or "that which is right".

Note that this religion is still alive, it is still practiced!

That such a great religion could be shown as nothing more than the aggrandisement of the God-Emperor, who is shown as someone who really has a God complex, continues to disgust me.

And now imagine how the opinions of simple people towards the Parsees (Persians) in India will change when they watch this movie, this being their only source of information on the subject.

The whole thing just horrifies me.

The fourth reason is the bloodsport

I like to think that human society has advanced since the times of the ancient Romans, and that we no longer enjoy seeing people suffer gruesome and horrible deaths. It seems, however, that I was wrong, and that we as humans are no better after all than our predecessors when it comes to bloodlust.

But is this what we should be encouraging? Is this really right? A friend of mine (a girl) was constantly cringing when she watched the movie.

Now I, having seen real decapitations, and real beheadings, don't think much of the violence - as always, it pales before the real thing. But what of others? Is it right to pander to the bloodlust and baser feelings of people? It is not a matter of whether this person has the right to or not - he absolutely does - but a matter of whether it is right to do so. And I emphatically say that it is not. As a culture, humanity should be moving away from all this, not towards it.

The last is the values being propagated

Suffice it to say that aggressive militarist eugeneticist slavery-based fascism, coupled with superioritism, does not appeal to my sense of morals and values.

I consider the movie also a very great insult to Arya cultures all over the world, including my own. India is a sister culture to Persia, and that our values and way of life, which still continues in many ways similar to the old times, are shown in such a manner is disturbing to me.



I can't fully express my distaste for the movie in words - it brings up too many associations and memories - but I hope I have done a fairly decent job of why I think this movie is disgusting beyond belief, and beyond redemption.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by aneeshm
He came away believing that it was the truth.
...
And this is the impression which was carried away by one who is quite intelligent.