FILM REVIEW - 300.
The story of the famous 480 B.C.E. Battle of Thermopylae last stand made by 300 Spartans against a million strong Persian army is well known, and the subject of many poems, books, and films. The 2007 film is based on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same title.
The story is relatively simple. The Persian army, under the rule of Xerxes, is rapidly conquering Greece. They then come to the militaristic small Greek nation, Sparta. Here, the culture is totally rooted in warfare and aggression. Boys are trained for battle as soon as they can walk. Infant males who may not make it as warriors are thrown over a cliff to their deaths soon after birth. The men of Sparta are raised in a culture of heroism, glory and death. Retreat and surrender are seen as a basis for disgrace and cowardice is virtually unknown. .
The initial Persian advance on Sparta is diplomatic. They send a messenger, and his retinue, to ask Sparta to offer land and water to the Persian forces passing through. King Leonides doesn’t just refuse to co-operate with the messenger, but kills him and his men by throwing them into a wide, deep well. This inevitably provokes the Persians into a full scale assault on Sparta.
The action taken by Leonides is not a popular one. He finds that Sparta will not back his passionate drive to send the army against the encroaching Persian forces. Even the oracle he consults advises against going to war, a consent that needs to take the entire Spartan army, which would have consisted of thousands of men. Against the orders of his own senate, Leonides takes as many men as he dare, the three hundred, and marches to battle anyway.
On route, a body of Greek part time soldiers joins the Spartans, an army composed of tradesmen, potters and guild workers, who Leonides feels will be weak beside the lifetime served soldiers of the main Spartan army.
Ephialtes, A mysterious dwarf, who turns out to have been hidden away by his mother at birth to prevent him being thrown to his death over the cliffs, tracks the Spartans in their journey. He begs now for a chance to join the Spartan Army, but he is refused, as he cannot lift his shield high enough to make him useful to a Spartan defender’s shield wall. Disheartened by his rejection, Ephialtes goes off to betray the army to Xerxes, telling him the best route by which to surround the small army.
Back at Sparta itself, it is Leonides’s wife, Queen Gorgo, who maintains the home front and uncovers a treasonous plot to sell the country out to the Persians. It is this action that has corrupted the incestuous servants of the Oracle and caused the reluctance to commit the entire army to the action led by the 300.
At the front, Xerxes, carried on a colossal golden throne, and looking like a nine-foot tall cross between Yul Brynner and Pinhead out of the Hellraiser films, personally supervises his massive forces. The Spartans see part of the Persian navy get shipwrecked on the rocks, and take that as an omen of their own coming victory. What follows is their stand against successive waves of Persian might and power that are hurled against them. In the initial attack, no Spartans are wounded or killed at all, but the tactics used by the Persians inevitably intensify. They attack with a rain of arrows, and the advance of their feared elite ‘Immortals’, a division believed, in the film at least, to be literally invincible. When Leonides proves that the immortals can be beaten, Xerxes sends in a larger force, which includes a war Rhino, and battle elephants, which the Spartans manage to defeat, but not without taking some casualties.
Now comes betrayal. Ephialtes sells out to the Persians in return for women and unlimited wealth as well as from his bitterness at his rejection as pure Spartan fighting stock. Xerxes moves round to trap and surround the 300, who fight on despite knowing now that they are doomed. Leonides feigns surrender, but casts forth a spear at Xerxes, cutting his ear, and proving that the man can indeed bleed and therefore is not a god as he has claimed. The Spartans and their warrior king are now however annihilated by wave after wave of arrows. Only one man, the film’s narrator, is sent away by order of Leonides in order to tell the story of what happened, and he returns with the now dedicated and full Spartan army to help push the Persians back as the Greek Empire begins its own meteoric rise.
The film is magnificent to watch, though at times battles look like preparations for a video game. Historically, the film veers from accuracy to quasi-mythical nonsense in near equal measure. It is true that Spartans killed racially, and physically impure male infants. It is not true that they had to kill a wolf as a rite of passage from child to man. In fact their rite of passage was to murder a slave without getting captured. The depiction of the strong willed Spartan women is realistic, though the queen’s murder of the treacherous senator at her own court is not. The betrayal by a man called Ephialtes is an actual event, though there is no evidence that he was a hunchback. That he, genuinely, a humble shepherd by trade, sold out for money and women seems plausible enough. The Hunchback assertion seems to tie his act of betrayal to the Oedipus myth. Here the notion and prophesy that someone who proves weak would destroy Leonide’s has led the hunchback’s mother to hide his existence away and he has grown up to fulfil the prophesy. The film makes use of other mythical elements that strip it of any genuine air of social historic realism too. The Persians unleash a giant ogre like figure, who is more like an Orc from the Lord of the rings than a man. Once he loses an eye he is a veritable Cyclops too. The elephants are also grotesque, like the Olyphant’s of the Lord of the Rings fame. … Ephialtes is largely presented as a Gollum like figure, stalking the army from the surrounding hills, etc.
King Leonides did consult an oracle, but not one in Sparta, in a temple ruled by ghastly looking incest obsessed priests – he went to the Oracle Of Delphi.
Some of the speeches by Leonides are excessively gung ho, and even fascistic. The simplistic depiction of the Persians is particularly controversial, and has upset many of their modern day Iranian descendants, who see themselves presented as outright villains taking on a righteous army. Such an interpretation is itself misleading. The Persians are certainly seen as rather a caricature force, led by a highly camp and eccentric leader. In fact, Xerxes, a quite short man who sported a beard, was never at Sparta personally. He was not nine feet tall. The Persians are seen more as decadent and as a force of unlimited resources than as proto-Islamic entities. Xerxes seems to like freaks and grotesques. If anything the Persian warfare tactics are based on limitless capital and waste. They are prepared to unleash anything at Sparta, no matter what the cost. They produce the elephants and rhinos of another continent; they buy off Ephialtes, another freak for their collection, with an obscene amount of money.
To be fair, the Spartans are equally seen as far from totally moral or righteous. Their execution of the diplomats at the beginning of the film is seen as the root of their own undoing. Their racial purity obsession equally ruins them in the form of Ephialtes who avenges his exile by siding with their opponents. Leonides is insensitive to the Greeks who are willing to fight with his men.
Xerxes was a much wiser ruler than he is portrayed in the film, though he did believe in his own divinity. His father, Cyrus The Great, is mentioned in the Bible (the book of Esther) as a defender of the Jews. Ordered by the Egyptians to kill Jews seeking sanctuary in Persia, he executed any Egyptians who were involved in the attacks on the Jews. He also produced the ‘Cyrus Cylinder’, regarded as the earliest ever-human rights charter in history.
There was elite fighting force known as the Immortals serving under Xerxes. They were not heavily masked and armoured as they are seen in the film, but actually closer in battle dress to how the Spartans are depicted, mostly naked, for swift movement. Their status as immortals was due to them holding a large reserve, so that when any Immortal fell dead, wounded or exhausted, he was immediately replaced in order to keep the numbers consistently high, leaving the enemy with a never depleting opposition that tried to win by sheer weight of man-power.
The film depicts an army of heroic men fighting bare chested, (Though in reality, the Spartans fought in heavy body armour) and therefore it has become a popular film for gay and female audiences, Interestingly, the Spartans are quite sneering towards Athenian Greek homosexuality, “The Athenians are philosophers and boy lovers!” snaps Leonides, though some of the soldiers in his small Spartan army seem to have some deep affectionate bonds to one another, and Leonides does not object when Xerxes massages his shoulders while offering him wealth and power if he should choose to surrender.
The film features many rousing battle speeches and memorable one-liners. ‘This is Sparta!” yells Leonides when criticised for fighting a battle he now knows he cannot possibly win or survive. Told by the Persians that their arrows will fly in such concentration as to block out the sun, Leonides says casually ‘Then we shall learn to fight in the shade’. Such lines are actually taken from the historic accounts of the events. Herodotus quotes the famous defiant army to army taunt from Leonides, ‘Molon lave’, used in the film in English as ‘Come and get it’ Even Queen Gorgo’s line ‘Because only Spartan women give birth to real men.’ Is equally well documented.
The film provides tremendous entertainment, despite its mythologizing and departure from the record. Another controversy is the soundtrack, which is now believed to make unauthorised borrowings from the film Titus, which was based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. The rest of the Spartan forces were not at ease or unsupportive of their king as depicted in the film. The war was fought on several other fronts, including at sea. The storm that is seen in the film wrecking a significant portion of the Persian fleet undermines the role in that played by the Greek and Spartan naval forces. Sparta, though seen as champions of Greek Democracy, was very much a slave and caste obsessed society with strict and repressive laws and high discipline. The stance taken by the real 300 was a holding action – a noble, brave willing suicide mission to enable the rest of the army to prepare for what was to follow, which led to the crushing of the Persian forces, and the beginnings of the Empire that would rise under Alexander The Great, largely through Greek conquests of the Persian lands.
A list of great quotations from the film is online at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416449/quotes
Arthur Chappell
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