Tonight We Dine in Hell

There are two things that really bother me in modern movies. The first is CGI; it stifles creativity and gives filmmakers an easy way out of filming certain scenes. The other is when filmmakers take liberties with historic event which has led to my ban of bio-flicks. Yet even though it breaks two of my cardinal rule, 300 is still a sight to behold.

My dislike for CGI typically comes from making computer generated images try to look like real things, but usually failing, taking viewers out of the movie. But this doesn’t apply to 300 which doesn’t try at all for realism, instead goes for the stylized version that Frank Miller used for his graphic novel the movie is based on. And that is also why I give the movie a pass on historical accuracy because the movie is much more about the look than the story (although director Zach Snyder claims the events are ninety percent accurate).

It take a while for the story to get moving as the first half of the movie spends more time setting up the political aspects of the film. Oh, and ignore all the pro-Bush stuff that surrounded the film, the script is taken word for word from the graphic novel written back in 1998, long before he launched his War on Terror. But despite the lull at the beginning, they only kill three Persians in the first forty minutes; you are too distracted by the surrounding to even care.

And when the action starts, the film never wanes as the Spartans defend the land from literally millions of Persians, and other Asians they have conquered and enslaved. And with all the killing, the Spartans literally build a wall of dead Persians; it is hard to recommend the movie to anyone but your token straight dude who likes football, books about war, and all that stuff. Well certainly gay dudes could thoroughly enjoy the movie too, but for entirely different reasons. The Persian God-king Xerxes, played by that random dude who was killed off Lost last season, is gayer than anything you would find in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Not too surprisingly Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced the film (which should be reason enough to see it). No word on what film enthusiast and crazed dictator in his own right, Kim-Jong Il, thought of the movie.

300 gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.