"Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by..."

Went to see 300 tonight with a friend. 300 tells the tale of the sacrifice of the 300 Spartans under King Leonidas who held the pass at Thermopylae against a horde of invading Persians, buying time with blood and valor for the rest of Greece to pull together enough troops to whomp the Persians once and for all. This story has fascinated me since boyhood, when I stumbled across a book on the two great Greek-Persian wars.

300 is visually awesome, a pretty movie. Utterly beautiful film. Lots of GCI, of course, but still a gorgeous vision. It's rather bloody; think Saving Private Ryan with swords and spears. Not to mention the world's biggest female nipples. It's worth seeing, in spite of my comments below.

As history, however, the movie left me cold. They got the basic story right -- kind of hard to screw up Heroditus. BUT, the military geek in me cringed at some of the visuals. Between the gold-chain bondage gear of the Persian nobility, the freakazoid monster "heroes" of the Persians, the silver fright masks of the elite Persian "Immortals(!)" reminded me of Imperial Stormtroopers from Star Wars or the Sirdukar from the movie Dune," the leather(!!) swimming trunks and complete lack of torso armor(!!!) on the buff steroidal Spartans.

The racial and political overtones in this movie were awesome. Not as awesome as, say V, which is one of the very best political movies made in a very long time. Buffed up white boys, facing down the endless parade of dark-skinned Freaks From The East. A resolute, tough-as-nails commander facing down a gold-chain wearing pierced freakazoid who brings along an elite Lesbian Orgy Corps for his campaigning pleasure and does not even fight alongside his men?

This movie is political propaganda in the great tradition of The Battleship Potempkin and Aleksandr Nevsky. "We are few but mighty! Resist the Asiatic FreakHordes before they get your women and children!" What really cheezed my bacon was the portrayal of Sparta as the bastion of freedom and democracy of ancient Greece. Sparta had a frigging king, for the love of Zeus, with a slave-holding military aristocracy. The Athenians, from whom most of the good of ancient Greece originated, were denegated as "boy-lovers" -- talk about your playing to old stereotypes -- kind of like the way the French were called "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Finally . . . after King Leo and his short battalion embark on their one-way cruise across the River Styx, the whole of Greece faces down the Persians. In other words, a war waged by a coalition. And don't get me started about the oracle scene. The ephors looked leperous, like a coven of Sith lords studying the Dark Side of the Force. It seems like everything that did not jibe with the message of the need for military superiority over the asiatic hordes was portrayed as freakish.

I could go on, but why? It was pretty and my friend and I had a good time. If you want your Spartans with a quivering side order of historical accuracy, then check out this wonderful book

Go see it.