Class Action 300

After many years of apathy I wound up watching 300. I didn't have the dilemma many people had on seeing the film, which was they left confused as to whether they had seen an awesome film or a terrible one. At the time it probably was both, but I'd seen it after the South Park parody - 'Lesbos' and thus could not take the movie seriously.

It is I feel characteristic of Frank Miller's work - the man has an incredible knack for visual storytelling and yet is one of worst writers of dialogue etc. Even his best works like Sin City and Batman: Year One had this failing, the dialogue seeing horribly predictable and cliche. It's tolerable in the comics when you don't have actors like Gerard Butler, David Wenham and even Benecio Del Toro hamming it up, but barely.

So yeah, while 300 is well visually stylized, the plot (which is embellished from the comic) is one of the worst takes on history ever.

I think though that while 300 isn't news, given how long its taken me to see it, it is an important illustration of how embellished our view of history can be. I suspect modern day Persian heartlanders (being Iranian) have enough sources of hostility with the world, but if you are a Zoroastrian at the very least, you could be incredibly pissed off at 300 flattering portrayal of Spartans standing for freedom?? versus Xerxes I and the Persian army.

The Spartans presided as tyrannical rulers as the minority ruling class of the region with 80% of the population being made up of the agrarian Helots. When Leonidus derides the Athenians as 'boy lovers' he conveniently glosses over the Spartan practice of pederasty, which expected boys to find an older lover by age 12 or so.

By comparison the persian empire was the first to practice freedom of religion and had a prohibition against slavery, most notably freeing the Byzantine Jewish community. Their capital was built by paid labour and the Persian Empire, the first world empire represented the most civilzed people on earth.

Sure Xerxes marching an Army to Greece the size of 200,000 had its practical drawbacks, namely being way too large to keep well fed logistically, but the '300' spartans were accompanied by around 7,000 other troops. Furthermore the notion of 'victory' is one of those that is ambiguous in history as well.

The stand was bold, brave and costly by the Spartans, but ultimately they were wiped out, which Xerxes seemed to conclude, had made his point. Then Athens was raised to the ground by his forces, Xerxes in a 'Bush-esque' fashion declared victory and went home. A much reduced force was then defeated by the Greeks, who indeed won their freedom, but it was the Athenians who were the founders of democracy, Spartans were a parasitical tyranny, the Helots at least would have stood as much better off under Persian rule.

And that's as much as we can tell. But portraying Xerxes as a 7 foot lesbian, the Spartans noble upholders of democracy and the Persian army as an incompetent, duplicitous travelling freak show does an injustice to the complexity of human civilization and our derived historical identity.

The benefits of either side winning are debatable, Greece after all was absorbed by the Roman empire that engulfed most of Europe in a sophisticated form of military dictatorship, Europe then became a haven for absolute monarchs for what is known in the west as the 'Dark Ages' and in the Middle East as 'the Islamic Golden Age' and somehow through some cruel twist of fate, the situations now seem somewhat reversed, though I'm sure what remains of the future probably belongs to the athiests.