alphacat said:Basically a 2 hour war propaganda piece - at least, to me. Maybe that wasn't the intention, but is it any coincidence that the bad guys were *Persians* and dressed like Muslims despite being set 1000 years before Mohammed?
Or that the king broke their sacred law to defend against the encroachments of the Persian tyrant, the last holdout against the forces of darkness? (This despite the fact that you never saw what made the Persians so nefarious - you just knew they were bad guys because they were either Semitic, Black, and/or mutated/deformed, and/or had their face pierced in weird places). Meanwhile the Spartans, with their Darwinian infant-slaughtering & might-is-right ubermacho drag, aren't really easy to sympathize with because the self-righteous sociopaths don't want or need your sympathy as an audience, they're so f*cking tough! (GRRRR!)
Then you have the greasy lying spineless opportunist politician sub-plot, an obvious jab at anti-war politicians. The timing of the movie - with Bush asking for 20,000 new troops and the looming military expansion into Iran - is suspect. It suddenly calls into question Frank Miller's agenda here, that's for damned sure.
Ironically, Sparta was a total slave state with a 7:1 slave to citizen ratio.
And as far as being "the new Matrix" - eh. Not really. Like someone handed someone else a comic book and said "turn this into a movie that looks like a comic book." Even at that it fails though, because there's too much talking, the violence is so stylized it gets boring, and... the fact is that this was basically a fantasy movie that borrowed elements of an actual historical tale, but very selectively.
Then there were the funny but a little questionable homophobe jokes delivered while wearing leather codpieces and red velvet capes?!?... Are you kidding? I could go on and on.
The floating redhead was alright though.
Yummybud said:
