By Andariel Halo

I've had my months leading up to the movie and afterwards of trashing this movie, thinking, crying, screaming, masturbating, pretending to be serious and an expert, for not only its blazing historical inaccuracies, but it's ridiculous treatment of basic physics and logic. Nowhere else can you see 300 naked men bellow at two massive elephants and send them toppling off a cliff, or a single naked man kill a charging rhino with little more than a flimsy wooden spear.


Everything in 300 save for a scene with horses was filmed in a garage or warehouse against green or bluescreen, and it removes a certain grittiness from it that fails to capture the audience and thrust them right in the midst of the action.
Another major failing is the Spartans themselves. The key to any superhero comic movie (because these Spartans can't be human) is for the hero to be endearing to the audience. The director appears to have completely fumbled this, by making the main characters incredibly arrogant, intolerant, and smug, while giving them anachronistic ideals of freedom and liberty (like Pope urban II preaching equality and tolerance of those towel-headed sandniggers) which rather than preach, they bellow at one another.

"IIIII FIIIIIIGHT FOOOOOR FREEEEEDOM HAA OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"  "IIIIIIII DOOOOOOOO TOOOOOOOOO HAA OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!"

Rarely does Leonidas say anything that isn't shrieked in the most bellicose manner possible. His lines range in depth and complexity from "SPARTAAAAANS! PUSH!" "SPARTAAAAAANS!! PREPARE FOR GLOOOORY!!" "SPARTANS!!! WHAT TRADE DO WE PLY?!?!?!?!?!" "SPARTAAAANS! WE WILL STAND AND FIGHT!!!"


By failing to endear, and arrogance, I refer to several scenes:

- When Leonidas first meets Ephialtes.
In history, Ephialtes was a normal goat herder or farmer, who betrayed the Greeks by revealing to Xerxes a goat path leading around the pass out of greed. In the movie, he's a horribly deformed monster (akin to a mix of Gollum from LOTR and Joe Merrick, the Elephant Man), with a heart of gold, seeking to prove himself in battle. His effort to hoist a shield and thrust a spear is almost heartwarming in its attempts, yet Leonidas, undoubtedly with his penis draping his sandals, haughtily says that since he can't raise his shield high enough for long enough, he can't fight in a phalanx. 
Maybe if he were more polite about it, Ephialtes would have wandered off, or maybe IF THE SPARTANS EVER BOTHERED TO USE THE FUCKING PHALANX, it would make sense.  Director Zack Snyder claims he did away with the phalanx because it wasn't "cool enough" for his movie.

So in a movie that is supposed to be all "innovative" and shit, he chooses to do away with potentially innovative warfare to show us the same old shit we've seen in every Ancient Greek/Roman type movie, featuring BADASSMUTHAFUCKA2000BC with muscles and sword dancing around blinding his enemies with the sheer awesomeness of his chesthair and killing the shit out of them with big-fuck sword swings that walrus could avoid by simply spearing the fucker's balls with its walrus tusks.


- Leonidas very arrogantly mocks his Phokian allies for not being born to kill like the Spartans are.   God forbid you should have people HELP you in battle who are putting their whole lives growing the FOOD YOU EAT and the CLOTHES YOU WEAR and all the shit to KEEP YOU ALIVE to make fun of them for being butchers and bakers and dildomakers.  If it were like that in actual history, it's no wonder they just wandered back home when the Persians found the secret pass to go behind Spartan lines.  The fuck are they going to sacrifice themselves to help those motherwhoring Laconian niggers!

Movie cross-overs happen, which could be done greatly, but when you're pretty much ripping off the Lord of the Rings in the realm of just "freak demons boogeyboogeyboo", then it'll come out piss-poorly.

Ephialtes very much resembles Gollum in Lord of the Rings, and so too the Persian Immortals must have been dug up in Isengard, like the Uruk-hai in LOTR---they are not human, and look very much like Orcs. And the "Uber Immortal" as it was so brilliantly labeled, was little more than a more muscular work troll like in Return of the King.  I would completely rebuke this review and give the movie five stars if the UBERIMMORTALOMFGBADASSDUUUDE were introduced via Insane Clown Posse music, and did a jig for Leonidas before fighting.
The outfit of the immortals is purely ninja robes, with a silver mask of a face going like "BLEEEEGH".  And once the mask is raised, Aragorn gasps in shock as Lurtz has just slain Boromir, and now seeks to slay Aragorn, son of Arathorn next. 


Whatever humanity is left in the film is squandered for the more machismo audience who like their men with big dicks and their sex scenes to be as dull and unpleasant as possible.  YEAH!! YEAH!! YEAH!! YEEEAH!!  Queen Gorgo's role is little more than to look like a frumpy housewife, muttering about some incomprehensible thing or other while another Spartan attempts to hit on her.  Fuck you people who say she's hot, too.  Outside of this movie, I wouldn't know, but I know 50 year old housewives when I see them and I saw a 50 year old housewife's cleavage in this movie, attached to the Queen. 

Before Leonidas leaves, he treats the audience to a sex scene that can best be described as being staged like this:
- Day 30 of filming: Gerard Butler strips naked, goes in front of blue screen, pelvic thrusts.
- Day 140 of filming: The other woman strips naked, goes in front of blue screen, moans and cums.
- Day 61 of post-production: the two are digitally added together in the darkness to keep people from noticing that Butler's cock is actually penetrating Gorgo's belly button.

The dry-fuck friction from this completely lifeless affair was so prevelant, I felt clammy and germy just watching it.  Could it still be considered rape if the woman is catatonic and her pussy is completely dry?

This subplot, as far as I caught it, consisted of Generic Spartan #2 flirting with Queen Gorgo by threatening her, mumbling wickedly at her, and bumping up against her ass.
Eventually it ends with him getting stabbed in the public forum by her, and gold coins fly out of his stomach, and everyone around starts chanting and bellowing "TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR!!!!!"  Because apparently this wasn't obvious enough to us.  Actually, I take that back; it wasn't obvious at all.  It came out of fucking nowhere when this guy was in no way implicated at all as anything resembling a traitor, unless the mentality is "Yer eether with us, or yur with duh tair-ists".  For all I know, he could have been a pinyata, and those coins could have been chocolate.  How the fuck do those wrinkled-ass Spartans know he's a Persian traitor?  Is it a Persian tradition for traitors and spies to eat their reward money?  Or were those coins REALLY made of chocolate?

To the battle scenes: As mentioned above, Zack Snyder admitted to doing away with the phalanx because it wasn't "cool". So rather than attempt to give the audience something new, innovative, and unbelievably bloody and violent, he gives us the same old glorified one-man-army crap we've seen in a dozen action movies, what with the walrus puncturing testicles and the Gladiator depiction of barbarians dressed as Romans, and Romans being black women on chariots.

CG or not, there's little innovation or anything to impress with the action scenes. Many times, you're left laughing or shaking your head in disbelief as the fighters go out of their way to look "cool" rather than deadly. One case in particular is when a Persian Immortal has a clear shot at a Spartan, and chooses, rather than to stab his naked chest, to DROP his weapon and DROPKICK him.  Bob Holly is not amused.  Mainly because he got shitcanned and no one likes him.  But ex post facto, who gives a shit.

The greatest fan service I received was seeing a Spartan get speared in the back, because they chose to be OMFGBADASSIMSOMUSCLYLOOKATMAHMUSCLESOMFGOMFGBADASSKICKASS and not wear anything remotely resembling body armor.
At some point, you get overwhelmed with the Spartans sticking Persians with their spears like hot knives through margarine, and giant waves of bodies keeling onto a wave of Immortals.  There's a difference between showing us extreme examples of gore in singular instances that shock us (Saw), overwhelming us with gore in quick, surgical, realistic doses (Rambo), and just giving us random instances of gore that are so throwaway and comical as to be in adult versions of the trend of "SHITTY GENRE SPOOF MOVIE".  Most disappointing would be RANDOM SLOW-MOTION SHOT of a Spartan being beheaded, only for no blood to rush up like a fountain.


And then comes what, based on the trailers I saw for The Watchmen, appears to be Zack Snyder's masturbatory fetish: random and pointless slow-motion sequences that serve absolutely no purpose except to show off unimportant details and boast how UBERSUPERBADASSCOOL the movie is.

Who gives a shit about seeing a leg snap Sid Vicious style from the pressures of brutal combat when you can see OMFGSLOWMO sequences showing off how a hurled axe cuts Leonidas' helmet plume, or how many rope fibers are at the end of a Persian's whip, or how many beads of sweat drip down the bronzed and chisled chest of a hot, sweaty, bronzed, manly Spartan with his nipples erect in adrenaline-soaked excitement and his muscles bulging with scars, veins, muscles, and grime and smooth chiseled jaw and hot sexy beard and gorgeous crystal blue eyes you could just fall into and live in forever just feeling so safe and warm you never want to leave.


Then comes LORD OF THE RINGS REFERENCE NUMBER 3: OLIPHAUNTS!  And unlike the Oliphaunt in Return of the King, in which fairy-pants elves had to surf all around it, kill all the riders, stab the shit out of it, and trip it over to its death, all it took to kill an Oliphaunt here was to hoot at it.

Keep that in mind kids, that when an elephant (or Oliphaunt in this case) is trained for war, BATTLE HARDENED, DRUGGED, AND MADE FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF BASHING INTO LINES OF SCREAMING ARMORED MEN AND STOMPING THEM TO SHIT, that the best way to defeat them is to bare your manly man chest at them, and hoot like the Spartans in this movie, which sounds rather like "HAA OOOOOO!".

So either the Persian elephant handlers here completely forgot several hundred years of basic elephant training (ie, elephants spook easily, so they need to be drugged with heavy wine to keep from spooking) or the Spartans are just so OMFGUBERSUPERBADASSDUDE that they can just HAA OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO at two elephants and have them fall off a cliff.  Or a director is just a hack asshole who fills up time by giving up a big fucking parade-worthy sequence and aborting it faster than a she-spic after spring break.  Hade Vansen is left reeling at how quickly that potential was wasted.

Same dealy with the rhino, who unlike the elephants, actually gets to DO SOMETHING and run, and GOOOOOOORE GOOOOOOOOOORE GOOOOOOOORE one of his own handlers.  loloops.  A new phrase would have been born if the same Spartan tactic were used on the rhino as on the elephant.  I can picture it now: "Hooting the Rhino", to be placed alongside "Jumping the Shark", and "Nuking the Fridge".  But instead, one Spartan gets a flimsy-ass spear, and chucks it (lolnigger) at the Rhino and kills it in one hit.

I may be a stickler for historical accuracy, but I can accept some inaccuracy.  But I draw the line at "completely shitting in the face of every conventional concept of reality, physics, science, and existence as we know it."  Because if you know shit, you know that if you shoot a rhino in the face with one 9mm bullet, you will not kill it.

So how in the fucking fuck will a spear moving at a fraction of that speed kill a rhino?

Even entertaining the notion that the spear penetrates its eye (which it doesn't), that still doesn't justify the rhino dropping dead and sliding up to the Spartans, rather than freaking out and blowing the everfucking shit out of all 300 of those naked fuckers in a maddened rage that would make a big motherfucking puddle of Greek blood to bathe and feed vampire monkeys in blood for fifty days and nights nonstop.  And they would laugh until the piss from their piss-slits is no longer yellow but red, pure red as blood, because there would be so much fucking blood from the carnage a pissed-off rhino could wreak that people would shit themselves at the gore-spectacled site.

But in Zack Snyder/possibly Frank Miller's world,  Rhino < slowmoving stick of wood and steel.

The Persians!  If I were Iranian, I'd be insulted, too.  However, if they casted the Iron Sheik as Xerxes, it would have been the greatest movie portrayal of Persians ever.

Instead, they don't even cast anyone Persian.  Xerxes is played by Dhalsim, somewhere post Street Fighter II, one of the Persian guys who says the whole "blot out the sun" bit is played by Cheech Marin, and everyone else is either a sandnigger or an Orc Ninja or a freak demon thing.

I'm not opposed to having Sandniggers or Orcs kill some bitches and get some bitches killed, but when all they do is get killed and represent the greatest Empire of the time and one of the greatest civilizations in terms of bureaucracy, art, culture, and wealth, you start to question whether an Orc can paint or a troll can haggle over the price of bread while retaining that healthy Tim-Burton-corpse-white skintone in a land where the sun is fifty feet from the ground.


There's little else going for the movie other than nonstop senseless action violence which gets excessive, broken only by the lonely and useless subplot with Gorgo looking frumpy and Spartan #2 forcibly kissing her.


Looking past the unbearably significant historical inaccuracies, the gaping holes in logic (like how 300 Spartans march off to battle without any supplies, no food or water or baggage train, with nothing but their capes, hotpants, spears, helmets, and shields) are spellbinding.  And what makes the Spartans look like total shit in the end is how they are able to stand up to THE MIGHTIEST OF ORC NINJAS and TWO OLIPHAUNTS and A FUCKING RHINO, yet they get done in by Persians coming in from behind.  You'd think the Spartans would be used to people coming up from behind them.


Depending on the lasting success of Sin City, and potentially Sin City 2, I doubt this movie would be thought of as much more than "300: FROM THE MAKERS OF THAT TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME SIN CITY MOVIE, THIS ONE IS KIND OF LIKE THAT, ONLY WITH SPARTAAAAAAAANS"  The only memorable thing in this piece of shit is Leonidas incoherently bellowing "THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" in response to being told that killing a foreign diplomat is "blasphemy and madness", which it is, by the way.  BUT HELL NAH, SUMBITCH!  SPARTA IS A STATE OF MIND!  HAAAA OOOOOOOOO!!!!