300...

[danfaz]

Rocked the F'N S#!T!!!

What he said!


There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend...

Those who love 300...and those that suck!

 

[darthviper107]

Now the Iranians are pissed off about 300.

https://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2007-03-13-300-iran_N.htm?csp=27

If everyone got mad at us for portraying their history in a negative way then we'd be at war with everyone. Including ourselves.

 

[occulum]

If everyone got mad at us for portraying their history in a negative way then we'd be at war with everyone. Including ourselves.

thats exactly what I was thinking.
We beat up on ourselves more than anybody.

just cant do anything anymore without stirring up a slap fight

 

[carbo-fation]

People need to watch this movie without trying to relate it to actual historical events. I personally don't agree with most of the stuff presented in the movie, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this kick-@$$ movie!! It was probably the best comic-to-screen adaptation yet! The cinematography and the acting were superb and I can't wait to watch it again at IMAX!!

 

[MisterToyNYC]

If everyone got mad at us for portraying their history in a negative way then we'd be at war with everyone. Including ourselves.

I read something similar at msnbc.com (https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17599641/?GT1=9145). I saw the movie. Did I miss something?!

Eric

 

[Vader AL]

i personally do not have the slightest care what Iranians think or like or don't like. can't wait to see the movie!

 

[Darklord Dave]

Iranians being upset about this film is like modern Italians being offended by the HBO series "Rome".

Perhaps I have a different perspective going in with some previous knowledge of the altercation (read the novel "Gates of Fire" - a more historical depiction of the thing). But the Persian army was amazing in what it accomplished, just as the Spartan's accomplishment was amazing. It's idiotic for modern Persians to see this as offensive.

 

[darth dypshyt]

The world would be a better place if people....ALL people, could laugh first...get angry later...I think confucious said that..

But, seriously, some people just aren't happy unless they are whinging...or blowing stuff up.. ...I just wish they could do it without annoying the majority of people on this planet..

Oh...only 22 more days until I get to see this movie..

 

[Darth Waller]

Just saw this last night. Awesome movie! I'm going to have to pull out the comics and re-read them.

Am I the only one who felt out-of-shape after seeing that movie? That army had more six packs than a liquor store.

 

[The ill Jedi]

Am I the only one who felt out-of-shape after seeing that movie?

You are not. I think many people her have started working out again 'cause of this movie!

 

[gideon]

First of all, I did see 300 last Friday and enjoyed it a great deal. The scene of the Persian navy amid the storm was worth the price of admission all by itself. Yes, it is a movie based on a comic book ... but which in turn was a comic book based on historical fact. It does bring up many questions about history and how we teach and learn it and the obligation of an author or filmmaker to the historical record.

I found this review of the film which gives much of the actual real history surrounding this event in history. It is not from a comic book.

Sparta? No. This is madness
An expert assesses the gruesome new epic

Mar 11, 2007 04:30 AM
The battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is 300? Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, has seen the movie and offers his view.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.

We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.

And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan "freedom." By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.

Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta's highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas' campaign, despite 300's subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300's Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers.

Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark.

300's Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan's education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb "to Spartanize" meant "to bugger." In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.

This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus' time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.

No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.

This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.

Filmmakers are in business to make films. They use fact, fictions and blends of both to do that. That is fine and part of the reality of the business. I had no problem with 300 presenting this historic episode they way they did. It made for a good film.

However, I also taught History in a high school for quite a long time and fully realize that a film like this now becomes the actual historical record for many who see it. Some will want to learn more and do some investigation into deeper source material on their own. Hopefully, they will come away with knowledge and understanding of the actual historical facts. But we should be aware, painfully aware, that we as a people are having our knowledge of history distorted and twisted by such factional/fictional presentations as history dressed up as entertainment.

The buyer should beware and go in fully armed with the knowledge that 300 is not pure history and what they emerge with from the darkened theater is not a knowldege of the events of the Greeks and the Persians. You saw a neat film and got your moneys worth.

 

[screamingmetal]

I've been avoiding this thread because I haven't seen the movie yet. From the comics, the 300 story always felt more of a mythological telling of a very real event. It's from modern people's points of view. Not necessarily from a modern person's view of Iranians, but a depiction of this evil enemy that's threatening to destroy all of what Greece represented and all of western civilization. That's why the Spartans were depicted completely nude in the comics, most of what we have seen of the ancient Greeks is from pottery and statuary which depict the Greeks as nude more often then not. So the mythological depictions is of them fighting nude, which I doubt they did much if not at all.

Muslims seem to have this victim mentality of always claiming to be the victim of the "Imperial West". When they see an opportunity to claim they're being victimized they act upon it excessively. It's also something that fuels extremest terrorism.
Muslims aren't the only ones who do it, most religions do the same. But we in the West notice it more then when it happens among us. Especially when their protests can become quite violent with the usual chant "death to America".
I think all people need to lighten up.

 

[Darth Waller]

Great post, screamingmetal! I agree with everything you said.

 

[Memnoch]

After Sin City and now 300 I really believe that Frank Millers work, when treated with love, redefines the cinema every time. There is just so much to say that I cant even express it without rambling like a child . As for the whole... Iranians crying foul and people *****ing this isnt historically accurate... GROW A SET already. This movie is totally an interpritation of a graphic novel which was inspired by a movie that was based on an ancient battle. If you really believe any Persian was that tall or people looked anything like depeicted in the film, well then you have a special room waiting for you. I would reccomend this film to anyone. And about reviewers, yea Ebert and Roeper are definatly the ones to trust even if you don't always agree with them. I would say they are by far the most professional.

Now someone give me a spear..

 

[Jen]

However, I also taught History in a high school for quite a long time and fully realize that a film like this now becomes the actual historical record for many who see it. Some will want to learn more and do some investigation into deeper source material on their own. Hopefully, they will come away with knowledge and understanding of the actual historical facts.

After I saw the trailer last fall I immediately bought the graphic novel, The Art of Making 300 and "The Spartans - The World of the Warrior - Heroes of Ancient Greece"
Movies I have seen based on some historical event have always made me want to find out more and get an understanding of the "real events" that occured. I love movies like this for pure entertainment...if I want a history lesson then I turn to the books or a good documentary. The History Channel had a great special on Spartan Culture - and of course like everything else 300 related, I bought my own copy. It is well worth your time if anyone gets a chance to see it.

 

[occulum]

yeah my Art of Making 300 and Immortal Swords came in today



as far as the movie not following the history exactly? who'duh thunk it!?

I thought there was really a giant fat guy that chopped heads off with his arms in the actualy hostorical events! MAN Im pissed now!

 

[Darth Waller]

This is for history:

This is for entertainment:

Any questions?

 

[Jen]

yeah my Art of Making 300 and Immortal Swords came in today



as far as the movie not following the history exactly? who'duh thunk it!?

I thought there was really a giant fat guy that chopped heads off with his arms in the actualy hostorical events! MAN Im pissed now!

Hey, post pics of your Immortal Swords!! I've been dying to see what those look like!!

 

[Jen]

This is for history:

Any questions?

Hey, WTF??? That Spartan there has armor on - what no bare chests and codpieces!!!??? That's can't be right!!

 

[occulum]

Hey, post pics of your Immortal Swords!! I've been dying to see what those look like!!

I'll do my best to this evening.
I dropped them off at home during lunch and I know I have to work some OT today.
But hopefully I'll get a chance to snap some pics...