´300´ Reasons Why This is a Bad Movie

OK, a non-Argentine related blogpost. I saw ´300´ and it made me so mad I just had to bash it on the internet.

First of all, it´s a bad movie. The dialogue is atrocious, the acting it terrible, the cinematography unwatchable, the fight scenes look like something out of a video game (which they no doubt soon will be), the plot twists idiotic, and the music 80s-era metal.

But, beyond that, it´s one of the most cringingly neo-fascist warmongering pieces of garbage I´ve seen in a long time.

It would be bad enough if it were in the one-white-man-can-kill-500-swarthy-Orientals mode, and the ´Greeks´ looked like they just got off the last chariot out of Stockholm, and the ´Persians´ are all faceless snivelling wretches or inhuman monsters. All of those are the case, but that´s not all.

It all starts because evil Persian emperor Xerxes (and whatever happened to ´ombra mai fui´?) asks for tribute from Sparta. Rather than pay it, the Spartans would much rather risk their entire civilization. As Leonidas explains, beating the Persians would mean ´a new era of freedom´ and would ´liberate the world from mysticism´, but that doesn´t stop him from praying to Zeus and going to oracles and leaving the weaker children on cliffs.

The Persians are constantly derided as ´slaves´, apparently ignonring the Spartans fondness for slavery. The Athenians are similarly scorned as ´boy-lovers´, ignoring the Spartans liking for that too. In one scene, with no apparent irony, Sparta´s King Leonidas tells his young son that ´Your strength in battle comes from the soldier beside you´. And not just in battle, kingy.

Back home, Leonidas is being backstabbed by a slimy anti-war politician who says he doesn´t want Sparta to go to war because one, it´s illegal, and two, Leonidas is provoking it anyway. Obviously the real reason he refuses to give Leonidas the support he needs is because he WANTS Sparta to lose, being in the pay of the Persians and all. Of course, he´s not wily enought to not carry his bribe around with him, and when he finally refuses to lend his support to the war effort, Leonidas´s queen stabs him in the middle of a council meeting, to warm applause and cries of ´Traitor!´

Ultimately, noble Nordic Leonidas is betrayed by the misshapen Spartan who ought to have been left on the crags to die, but his mother was too weak to weed out the Untermenschen, and now look what happened: he went running to the Persians, just because Xerxes didn´t treat him like dirt.

In the end, one feels inclined to agree with the NY Post´s Kyle Smith when he says: ¨Keeping in mind Slate's Mickey Kaus' Hitler Rule - never compare anything to Hitler - it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a "300" screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again.¨