300

spartans! enjoy your breakfast, for tonight we dine in hell! - king leonidas

so i managed to catch the movie, 300 today. it is a film based on comic book legend frank miller's graphic novel that retells the ancient battle of thermopylee where king leonidas and 300 spartans fought to the death against xerxes and his massive persian army.

what little plot there is, isn't really worth telling, nor is the writing for the most part. the movie has flat characters, big, loud dialogue and paper thin plot. but that's not the reason you go to a movie like this. anyone expecting a history lesson is delusional. 300 is there to entertain, that is all. it's a big, bloody action movie littered with heaving men buffed up on steroids with the occasional female nudity thrown in to reaffirm that this is a heterosexual, manly movie.

i enjoyed it. a lot of the reviews i read before seeing this movie tended to outline how much violence there was and how useless the rest of the movie seemed to be. well, personally, i thought the movie could have used more fighting and even less dialogue. there's this whole subplot of a local politician trying to consolidate power while king leonidas is away at battle which i found to be quite lacking. it was an effort to round out the story, but really, i didn't care. i wanted to go back to the battlefield and watch more people get their heads cut off. sounds gruesome i know, but sometimes after a night of drinking, all you want to do is sit around and not have to think.

there was some suggestion that 300 seemed to have parallels to the current political situation in the world, where this group of spartans are defending freedom against a brutish force as represented by the persians (re: insert iran, terrorists, etc). you can definitely draw parallels, especially with all the talk about defending freedom and how freedom comes at the cost of blood, but the graphic novel on which it is based came out before a lot of the current political blow-ups (no pun intended). personally, i never saw this movie as a political one. some reviewers used this silly parallel as a means to bash the movie. well, if you're going to bash the movie, bash it on its useless subplots, it's canned video game look and lack of any character depth (of which you will definitely score points on).

at any rate, 300 is pretty amusing. it filled my blood quotient for the day. shakespeare it is not, nor should it be, because sometimes you just want to see a man fight a giant troll.