If you hate freedom, you won't like 300

I just recently watched Frank Miller's 300 and I feel it's my duty to share with you all how awesome this movie really is. For those of you that have been living in a cave on Mars for the last 3 months, "300" is a Warner Bros. movie based on Frank Miller's graphic novel "300", which is based on the history of the Battle of Thermopylae in which several thousand Greeks (most notably 300 Spartiate elites) held back Persian hordes numbering between several hundred thousand and millions. If you want to read the history, you can try the wikipedia link; read on for the movie review.

I have to start with the criticism. The movie was long on nudity, and long on horror movie special effects. The comic book was long on nudity as well; but I appreciate Frank Millers decision to portray the Spartans in the "heroic nude" that you might see in ancient art. It was an interesting and bold artistic direction. The horror movie special effects, however, were not in the comic book and were a bit ridiculous.

From the beginning, it is obvious that this movie is trying to convey just how bad-ass Leonidas and his Spartans were. The conclusion, "Mission accomplished". The battle starts out with the Spartans squaring off against 10's of thousands of Persians and they quickly get up close and personal and fight for every square inch. Then the Spartans start killing them. First they kill the first row of idiots, and they move forward a step. Then they kill the second row of idiots and they take another step forward. Then they start stacking up the bodies like lincoln logs. The one on combat is very well choreographed to the point where my fiance thought it was almost graceful. I think she used the qualifier "almost", simply because it's hard to call a bloodletting "graceful". I have no such hesitations: it was graceful. The killing style was almost meticulous in it's intricacies. If these Spartans are supposed the best of the best, trained since youth, they better have some kind of crazy-awesome techniques that no other armies or soldiers have, and those crazy-awesome spear skills and sword skills come through in 300.

The dialogue was inspiring. Truthfully, the movie was full of machismo and one-liners, but it worked exceptionally well. I'm pretty sure Gerard Butler could have yelled every single one of his lines in his Leonidas roar and I still wouldn't have thought he was over the top. It's an over the top story of over the top soldiers from an over the top culture in an over the top war, and the movie does them all justice.

The movie is based on history, and the history is pretty simple: 300 Spartan warriors kill 10's of thousand of Persians that are trying to raze their countryside, rape their women, and enslave their children. Do you expect this film to question whether there is honor or glory in the horrors of war? Do you expect this film to delve into the complex moral decisions that leaders in a time of war must make? Do you expect this film to question our assumptions about the innate moral superiority of the Greek cause? I hope not! Because this film does none of those things, and rightly so. We have this modern obcession with deconstructing and sanitizing history until we have utterly ridden it of any humanity whatsoever. This is Greek history and Greek sacrifice and it deserves to be told from the Greek perspective, regardless of whether it improperly dehumanizes the Perisan armies (which this movie most certainly does).

I also think that it is entirely appropriate that the movie be grossly exaggerated. When you are telling an epic story it is your obligation as a story-teller to project the sense of awe that was felt by those that were present. This kind of story-telling naturally conjures up supernatural images in the listeners mind that are beyond the reality. I think it's entirely appropriate for comic book writers and film directors to try to capture those inflated images on paper and on film. Watching 300 gave me this sense that I was 7 years old and I was listening to an old man tell the story. The images on the screen were exactly what my mind would have conjured up.

I want to draw out one more observation about story-telling and connect it to this film. Morality is conveyed far better through story than through instruction. If you want to start your children on the road to virtue, tell them great stories of great men and women performing great deeds of honor and justice and virtue. Once that foundation has been laid, you can expound on the intricacies of ethical systems. You need great stories that exemplify right behavior more than you need systematic theorums. 300 is one of those stories. It is also an antedote to the anti-heroes that are regularly churned out by the mainstream media. I don't need whiny second-guessing protagonists that struggle more with themselves than with the forces of evil around them. I want to see the model. I want to see the gold standard by which we should all be so courageous to live by. That's why I loved 300, and that's why I think you will too... unless you hate freedom.