Mar 28, 2008 12:24 PM
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Since this is going to be a rather unflattering review it is only fit that I start with the positive points about the movie.
Ok, having got the positive points out of the way. we can proceed with the rest of the review.
First impressions.
-Spandex speedos & superman capes vs sexually deviant circus freaks with a penchant for piercings
-Perfect, beautiful, white humans vs deformed deviant non-white humans
-All that is perfect and beautiful from the west vs All that is grotesque and ugly from the east
-Tons of needless CGI(graphical special effects) blood that would make a samurai movie on a shoestring budget proud
-Scottish accented Spartans(now I am going into the ridiculous zone. LOL)
-300 vs 1 Million? (complete BS! All that the Persians needed to do was to keep moving forward and the whole bunch of 300 Spandex heroes would have been crushed underfoot. More like a few tens of thousand on either side. In those days, it was near impossible to gather so many(1 million) troops for one army all at once. The numbers need to be looked at more closely.
-A Spartan King who looks more like the Persian Kings than the Persians themselves. If you do not believe me take a look at the ancient carvings of Takht - E - Jamsheed
-The constant referral to recording the Spartan history and the remembering of the sacrifice of the 300 troops. It almost seemed like the did not want us to forget something. Cannot figure out what. Did they want us to remember the deformed version of history as portrayed in the movie versus the recorded one?
-Take some samurai troops along with their swords, put some grotesque mask on their faces, stick them in the middle of the Persian army and call them "The Immortals" HA! Talk about lack of imagination. I am sure that the Persian army had "The Immortals" but what I am not really sure of is that if they were drawn from Japanese Samurai. Ha Ha. Maybe they were Ronin? LOL! Highly unlikely. Persian influence did not extend that far east. That was really lame.
-The jingoistic portrayal of King Leonidas. This guy does three things in the whole of the movie.
1. Walks around looking perpetually pissed off
2. Start pontificating at the drop of a hat about liberty and freedom and way of life. Specially when they were well known for slavery. Ha! (BTW did they employ a Bollywood writer to pen the King's dialogues? They sure sounded like that)
- Shouting "SPARTANS" about every 5 minutes or so. He. He.
-Perfect timing of release to coincide with heightened rhetoric of certain advanced nations against the Central Asian component of the "Axis of Evil".(For those who cannot see the connection, please brush up on curent world affairs and some history. the history of the Persian Empire in general and the battle of Thermopylae in particular)
-Persians depicted as a bunch of deviant, grotesquely deformed, facial jewellery adorning misfits whereas history records the Persians as being some of the best nation builders ever. They had paid armies while the Spartans were know for slavery. (So much for "Liberty, freedom, BLAH BLAH bhashan delivered with a scottish accent). Do you still not see the connection with the propoganda thingy? Have you forgotten the recent invasion of another middle eastern country and the false propoganda that preceeded it?
-Distortion of history to the point of violent nausea
need I go on?
I had heard and read about this movie for some time and was very familiar with the malignation of historical facts to fit into someones idea of east vs west, Christianity vs Islam, European/American vs Asian, perfect white humans from the west vs grotesque circus creatures from the east. take your pick. I wanted to see how far away the reviewers were from the truth. Alas, they could not have been closer to the truth.
Enough for now. Take Care till the next time.
