300

300 was everything I expected, so it was a lot of fun. An adaptation of a Frank Miller comic about the battle of Thermopylae, it was just one long, bloody scrap, shot with very pleasant effects-saturated cinematography and lots of flights of fancy. So the Spartans didn’t have character shields, wouldn’t laugh at other Greeks for being philosophers and ‘boy-lovers’, and had lives beyond those of fighting machines, and of course the Persians weren’t a collection of daft stereotypes, freaks and monsters, but who cares? This is a flight of fancy, and if you want realism, you’re in the wrong place.

I could only fault three things: first, the tacked-on and patronising story about Leonidas’ wife, a ‘strong woman’ who can be given a strong role in this hypermasculine film as long as she gets her tits out, is totally inconsequential to the story and I’m willing to bet good money wasn’t in the comics; second, the dodgy animatronic wolf at the beginning; lastly, after pronouncing words like ‘Phalanx’ and ‘Leonidas’ in a better way than I usually do, the Greek king claims descent from ‘Hercules’? Pfft, no need for pandering. Heracles plz.