King Leonidas and his army of 300 stand around all dirty and sweaty and stuff.

So, about a year ago I saw a little web video where some no-name director was talking about his new film called 300. A film adaptation of Frank Millers renowned graphic novel about the battle of Thermopylae. The director, Zach Snyder, showed off some green screen footage and early CG effects tests and made wild claims that they were going to re-create the work of Frank Miller accurately and faithfully on the big screen. It smelled of copying. (i.e. Sin City) and frankly, I thought it was going to be a big crappy flop.

And of course I was wrong. The trailer generated so much buzz that it was crazy. It was just so gorgeous looking, the music so rocking, and the action so intense. How could you not want to go see this film. The trailer was freaking GOLD!

And the movie? Well…

Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time watching this film. It’s an all around great movie. It does so many things right that it can be hard to find anything wrong with it. That is, unless you look past the pretty imagery and well choreographed fight sequences. All of that is just surface stuff. And this picture is all surface and no substance. Which, frankly, is perfectly fine if that’s all your looking for.

Now, I am not talking about the historical aspects of this film. Many are going to bring up all of the historical inaccuracies and frankly, its silly. This film was never meant to be historically accurate. It is a kind of fantastical re-telling of a true story; The Legend of King Leonidas and his army of 300. There are 40 foot tall elephants, 10 foot tall rhinos. Heck, Xerxes is a solid 9 feet tall himself. If you want a historical retelling, check out the Discovery Channels recent special on the subject.

What is a little off putting however is the inaccuracies of the message. These men are fighting against an Islamic invasion. Fighting for the freedoms of the men and women of their country. Yet the society those three hundred men are fighting for turns beautiful young women into drugged up sex slaves for degenerate old lepers and throws weak, premature, or handicapped children off of cliffs and sends the healthy ones through years of torturous training in order to build a society of perfect soldiers. This is not really the right message is it?

But again, I don’t think your really supposed to look that deep below the surface of this film, so lets get back to surface level here. Ah, beautiful surface level.

I mentioned before…a lot…that this film is freaking amazing looking. They spent over a year in post tweaking this film to perfection and it shows. This is the most visually arresting film I have seen. Yet as great as this film was to watch, it seems that halfway through the battle, the director got a bit lost.

He does a good job setting up the size of the two armies, there is this great shot that shows off the narrow pass that the invading army must fight through, there is even a whole flashback sequence dedicated to displaying how the plan with the choke point is to work. And as the battle begins, he is working this idea of a choke point well. The army of 300 is working in unison and killing a ton of people.

Yet somewhere along the way the Director abandons this idea of a choke point and a better-trained army. Instead the battle sequences are reduced to a series of speed ramped trusts and swipes of spears and swords. It starts to become rather repetitive, and dare I say it, a bit boring.

But, before things get to bad, the end comes. And it’s nicely done. (My wife cried. So that says something.) And you leave the theater having just seen a whole lot of awsomeness. And lets face it, a movie about a small army of 300 of the greatest warriors to have ever lived facing off against one million men and nearly winning is pretty darn cool. Add beautiful effects and cinematography on top of that and you have a film that can’t be missed.

This film gets a very enthusiastic 3 and a half out of 5 stars.