Just as I promised a few days ear­lier, here’s what I think about 300. I went to the the­ater with only one expec­ta­tion: I wanted to see a heavy styl­ized film. And that’s exactly what I got. Well, first things first. Let’s start with some his­tor­i­cal back­ground infor­ma­tion on the bat­tle the Spar­tans and the Per­sians fought. I already wrote about it here and if you’re inter­ested you should dig it.Well, Dave and I bought the tick­ets and went for some beer which proved to be a bad idea. But hey, it hap­pened and we know what we shouldn’t do next time. After about an hour we got our­selves pop­corn and some coke and walked into the audi­to­rium. You have to know, watch­ing movies in Eng­lish isn’t that easy around here, so it is some kind of a niche mar­ket. That means that Eng­lish the­aters are small and cramped. Some­times the big the­aters are in for an Eng­lish ver­sion of a block­buster but they usu­ally pick their small­est screens for that pur­pose. You see, there was a cou­ple from the USA and when they walked in the guy said looked around and said to his wife/girlfriend annoyed: “It sucks.”.

What­ever he may have thought about the cramped con­fines, he cer­tainly enjoyed the movie. In short, 300 is a visu­ally stun­ning piece of art. It blends vio­lence, pol­i­tics, bru­tal­ity and nudity into an uncon­ven­tional movie expe­ri­ence. The bulk of the movie, how­ever, is devoted to bloody, highly styl­ized hand-to-hand com­bat. That’s exactly what I wanted to see. There were only two mildly dis­turb­ing things in the whole movie. I under­stand that, deriv­ing from a comic the movie is quite simple-minded, but it’s almost too much sim­pli­fied. You don’t get to know the enemy which is a sad thing. And then, there are the Spar­tans – nearly naked men with oiled 6-pack abs killing off wave after wave of Per­sian sol­diers. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the scenery and the action, but did their abs really have to shine that much? Not even blood wanted to stick to it, it seemed …

I like the artis­tic direc­tion and the impres­sion the watcher gets. It’s almost like a glance into the past. Did you know that their fight­ing styles and for­ma­tions are based on Spar­tan war­fare? They pur­pose­fully changed some things to make them look cool which, to my mind, works quite well. 300 deserves 8 out of 10 decap­i­tated heads.