Movie review: 300

"This is Sparta!" This is also a work of art, not a history lesson. Don't get me wrong, I thought 300 was a really good movie, but it makes Braveheart look like a documentary.

Maybe I'm too much of a geek, or maybe not enough. But when King Leonidas marches off with his 300 Spartan warrior "bodyguards" to face the hordes of the Persian Empire, the first thing I thought was "where are their supplies?" But this is a movie based on a comic book, and comic book artists aren't going to bother drawing supplies to support a troop of 300 men on the march, so it isn't in the movie.

Also, people going on about how this movie is a poke at/in support of the war in Iraq need to realize not everything is about Bush and Iraq. Movie. Comic book. Do the math. GW is neither Leonidas nor Xerxes.

Not everyone will like 300. It is a very stylized movie, as much about the imagery as the story. While the cinematography and art direction are great, I did find the graininess of the image on the screen distracting occasionally. Maybe I should have waited for the showing with the digital projector? The "look" of the movie appealed to me greatly, between the quasi-historical designs (I'm a sucker for that stuff) and the use of color.

The cast is very strong. In a movie like this, it would have been easy for the characters to have been reduced to caricatures, but they are given presence and emotion, something hard to do given the 2-dimensional source material.

I will definately be picking this up when it comes out on DVD (and if it plays in the IMAX I am going).

My rating: 4.5 of 5 leather-wearing spear-wielding flying monkeys.