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Just *finally* saw this. I'm really glad that someone else has compared it to Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" - my (primary) reading of it was as exactly that kind of piss-taking of US military/imperialistic values.
I also didn't really see it as "the Spartans are the good guys"... because the Spartans (at least as portrayed in 300) are clearly fucked-up, quasi-fascistic fundamentalist nutters. Maybe i'm just coming from a position of "no one could possibly unironically admire that", though... anyway, both sides seemed to me to be portrayed as evil bastards, it was just that this story was told from the viewpoint of one lot of evil bastards. Which, y'know, is pretty much what the history of most inter-imperialist wars is...
I also did see and appreciate Blake Head's reading tho. I think it's possible, and often desirable, to have a subversive reading of a(n ostensibly) pro-present-day-powers-that-be piece of art. Kind of like the various African Diaspora religious fusion movements taking the central narratives of Christianity and turning them back against the oppressors (except obviously on a much more trivial scale)...
(Blake Head's reading is pretty much exactly my reading of Lord of the Rings. Obviously Tolkien was a white upper-class Anglo-Saxon Christian from the aristocracy of the British Empire. Still, equally obviously LotR is a profoundly anti-imperialist work with one of its central messages being "power corrupts" and "the oppressor's power tools cannot be used against the oppressor, but must be abolished entirely", and it's certainly possible for LotR to inspire me as an anti-capitalist/anarchist, although it's equally necessary for me to ignore the Orientalism, monarchism and classism in it in order for it to do so.)
Back to 300: Loved the visual effects, for all the reasons already mentioned. Was a bit disappointed that there was only one war-rhino, tho. Also, there was a really blatant plothole in that why the fuck didn't Leonidas just kill Xerxes when they met one-to-one much earlier on in the film. Did Spartan culture/ethics forbid it, or what? If it did, it could have been made a bit clearer - otherwise, it just looks like Leonidas majorly missed a trick there...
Also, Sparta: get some fucking archers...
Oh yeah, fucking awesome woman-getting-her-revenge-against-rapist scene too. In fact, the Queen was possibly the only truly heroic character in the film. A shame (and ironic) that a) she was never even given a name, and b) the rapist had to be the "appeaser", because, y'know, %Real Warrior Men would never do such an unwarriorly thing like rape%. The politics subplot did definitely feel tacked on (and inconsistent with the total-warrior-culture portrayal of the Spartans).
So... things to love and things to hate about it. But, IMO, a lot easier to enjoy if you go from the starting point that this isn't the sort of film where there are good guys, but the sort where every "side" are a bunch of assholes... |
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