Platypus Review

This review is expanded from a response to a friend's request for my thoughts on "300." Giving a just review of the film would take volumes, and so I have had to be selective in this post. In the main, I have tried not to cover territory that has already been covered by my betters. The closest approximation to my thoughts would be to take the reviews of Dr. Touraj Daryaee, Dr. John-Mark Reynolds, and Dr. Paul Cartledge, put them in a blender and hit "frappe." I have posted the links to all three reviews in previous posts. Naturally, with a movie as controversial as "300" I understand that this review cannot hope to please at each point. Critics may wish that my condemnation of historical inaccuracies and negative images of the Persians were more forceful and dilatory, while supporters may wish for a more strident defense of the movie's strengths. Both have been done by my betters, and I would refer you to them. As always, those that know me are free to question me at length in person, and I feel that that is perhaps the best format for this sort of discussion. As a final note, it has been abnormally hard to gather my conflicting thoughts on this film, so where the review may seem a bit scattered, I will have to plead that it is only as scattered as my musings.



I can really only liken "300" to a pagan "Passion of the Christ." I found myself thinking within the first fifteen minutes: "this is so beautifully pagan, that it's as if the ball's been placed in our court to answer it... oh wait, Gibson!" It's one of those movies that I'm glad I saw, but I don't plan on seeing it again any time soon. To wax eloquent, 300 is a pagan opera in the vein of Richard Wagner. Of course by "pagan" I mean more than simply "polytheistic" and definitely not "uncivilized" or "barbaric!" I mean the deeper levels of that worldview: a proud and defiant despair in the face of an unreasoning and ultimately unfair Nature. The rights and rituals of Greek paganism are largely absent in "300," but the soul of Homer is there in all its stark and human glory.

To move on from the raw impact, I think many people misunderstand the film. I cited the comic book and the movie in my Master's thesis last year, before the movie came out. I had a feeling that the film would generate resentment among the Persian community in the 'States and the Iranians in the Middle East (and yes, they do have a right to be!). The "300" depicts the Persians as deformed freaks, and that has been amply decried, but look who's telling the story: the best liar/story-teller in Sparta. We shouldn't trust his portrait of the battle, let alone the Persians!!! The idea of the film is to get us to feel about Thermopylae the way that the Greeks felt about it. That in itself is problematic since our most reliable records of the Persian Wars come from only two authors: Herodotus and Aeschylus. Historians can go on for hours parsing out all the nuances of how these two view the Persians. Still, in the main, we can note some common elements: Undisciplined, exotic Persian hordes versus the the disciplined, homogeneous Greeks, Persian decadence and effeminacy versus Greek reserve and manliness, and the Persian "Great Leader" versus the Greek "First-Among-Equals." This seems to be just the line that the movie follows. Judging, then, from my own experience, and the experiences of my students who went to go see it, "300" accomplishes that goal with flying colors. The few times in which the illusion of "Spartaness" is broken are the exceptions that alert us to the rule. I remember the collective gasp that the audience let out when Leonidas says to Ephialtes: "May you live for ever!" When a "historical" film can make people feel that like a "Spartan," not just acknowledge intellectually what's going on, then it's done its work. Let us be clear, Hollywood's job is to entertain and inspire, it is the historian's job to teach history! The movie has been a windfall in that arena, raising interest in what is an all but forgotten event in the public mind. I've been able to set the record strait with my students, but they wouldn't have bothered to listen to me, let alone ask hours worth of questions, if "300" hadn't sparked their interest.

I do worry that the film glorifies violence. That's one message our culture gets far too often, even if a brief scan through Homer demonstrates it to be very Greek. I don't see "300" being used as effective propaganda to bomb Iran any time soon (Can we really picture Hollywood in bed with the Bush Administration?!?). Just tell me how many Americans have any idea at all that Persians=Iranians (Especially after Khomeini's government did everything in its power to break with the Achaemanid Persian past)!!! However, granted that the movie is supposed to be "Spartan propaganda," it does genuinely disturb me to see a culture as grand and storied as the Achaemanid Persians turned into a show-case for "freak of the week." Even the comic book saves that for Xerxes and lets the Persian army, by-en-large, off the hook. I think I would have preferred to see a movie more like "Tora,Tora, Tora!" which attempted to portray both sides fairly and thereby increase the drama. After all, to turn the standard critique of the movie on its head, some parallels can be drawn between decadent, multi-cultural, imperial America and the Achaemanids as well as between brutal, mono-cultural, hegemonic insurgency and the Spartans.

So what can I say in sum? "Did I like the movie?" Yes and no. "Was it a good movie?" Yes and no. "Is it historical?" Yes and no. "Should I go see the movie?" Yes and no. This film continues the long battle between Dionysus and Apollo in true Greek fashion. But ask yourself reader: oh what a movie "300" must be to provoke so many "yeses" and "nos!"