alt title(s): Three Hundred
King Leonidas: You bring the crowns and heads of conquered kings to my city's steps! You insult my queen. You threaten my people with slavery and death! Oh, I've chosen my words carefully, Persian. Perhaps you should have done the same!''
Messenger: This is blasphemy! This is madness!
King Leonidas: Madness...?
This! Is! SPARTA!
Better known as
300, this is the Zack Snyder film based on the Frank Miller
Graphic Novel that he wrote after seeing
The 300 Spartans, which is
based on the Battle of Thermopylae as described by Herodotus
as occurring in 480 BC.
A young, one-eyed soldier relates to a group of soldiers how
recent events came to pass. King Leonidas of Sparta refuses to bow to
the God King Xerxes' demand to submit to the Persian Empire. A visit to the deformed, elderly
Ephors and their
Oracular Urchin/Sex Slave brings worse news: Sparta cannot wage war on the eve of the sacred Carneia festival.
After much deliberation, Leonidas gets around this by gathering 300 men and calling them his 'personal bodyguard'. Leonidas' plan is to walk to the Hot Gates ("Thermopylae"), a narrow pass between the ocean and mountains. By rebuilding an ancient wall to bottleneck the vast Persian Army, the superior fighting ability of the Spartans would make up for the small size of their army. Seven hundred or so other Greeks turn up on the way. A
hideously deformed man called Ephialtes makes his appearance, asking Leonidas for a place on the battlefield in exchange for information about a back door that would leave the Spartans wide open. Leonidas won't accept him into the fighting ranks, so Ephialtes sells his information to Xerxes for women, wealth and a (horrible) uniform.
Much, much ass-kicking ensues.
Meanwhile, Queen Gorgo tries to persuade the Spartan politicians to support Leonidas, but Theron, scarily played by Dominic West, is the most stubborn of the lot.
The film
300 is very stylized, as it's presented as a morale-boosting story by Dilios, a Spartan orator, on the eve of the Battle of Platea in 479 BC.
Word Of God states that Dilios doesn't let the facts get in the way of his story, intentionally leaving out a lot of extra detail and exaggerating pretty much everything, and weaves many parts of the story out of wholecloth. Most apparent about this is the fact that he tells exact dialogue of scenes he didn't witness which would be unknown to him, and everything is painted in pretty broad strokes: The legions of the Persians are
monstrously inhuman, whereas the Spartans are all
white, muscular men.
This film provides examples of:
- Adaptation Expansion: The entire Gorgo subplot was created for the movie, and in fact the film is better for it.
- Alternate DVD Commentary: If you love 300 and think it's awesome, you should check out the Rifftrax. If you hate 300 with the passion of a thousand suns, you should definitely check out the Rifftrax.
- Back To Back Badasses: Stelios and Astinos.
- Beauty Equals Goodness
- Blood From The Mouth
- Bowdlerise: Male genitalia appeared in the graphic novel, while all male characters wear at least their Spartan shorts in the film.
- Chroma Key: All but one shot were done in a Montreal soundstage in front of a blue screen.
- Conservation Of Ninjitsu: 300 vs 1,000,000.
- Crowning Momentof Awesome: "This! Is! SPARTA!"
- Diagonal Cut: Horizontal, but the same effect.
- Doomed Moral Victor - an army of those
- Elite Mooks: The Immortals.
- Equal Opportunity Evil: The legions of Xerxes are from all over the world, and he even hires hunchbacks!
- Everyone Calls Him Barkeep: Captain Artemis as "Captain." Fair enough, considering Artemis is a woman's name.
- Well, it's a goddess' name at least, but your point still stands...
- However, Artemus is the male form of Artemis.
- Face Heel Turn: Ephialtes.
- Final Speech
- Giant Mook
- Honor Before Reason
- Ho Yay: Though this is justified by accounts that Spartans (both men and women) regularly took lovers of the same gender — though the producers likely thought that this was as far as they could go with that plotline while avoiding the Media Watchdogs.
- Only if by "the producers" you mean "Frank Miller when he wrote the original book", since there was no Ho Yay there either.
- The Spartans' well-known institutional pederasty made Leonidas' disdain for the "boy-loving" Athenians unintentionally hilarious, however.
- Miller justifes this in the graphic novel itself, by saying that while the Spartans did indeed take young boys as lovers, they also lied about it. "We got the word 'Hypocrisy' from the Greeks, after all."
- Hufflepuff House (The Arcadians who come help the Spartans)
- Large Ham : Butler is far from being the only offender, although HE ! IS ARGUABLY ! THE WORST !
- Mc Ninja: The Immortals
- One Liner: Plenty. Stelios's "Then we shall fight in the shade," Leonidas's "This is SPARTA!", "Tonight we dine in Hell!", and "Come and get them!" The narrator Delios receives a slightly more subtle joke: When asked about his one eye, he replies, "It's only an eye. The gods saw fit to grant me a spare." Historically, the Spartans were well trained in philosophy and literature, and several of the above lines were either paraphrased or directly taken from actual accounts of the battle.
- One Sided Battle: Three hundred Spartans and 700 Thespians versus several hundred thousand Persians. The Persians are overwhelmed in battle until the climax.
- Ooh Me Accents Slipping: During the "This Is SPARTA" scene, Gerard Butler occasionally slips into his native Scottish accent when threatening the Persian messenger.
- Opening Monologue: Dilios describing The Spartan Way.
- Praetorian Guard: The Immortals
- Refuge In Audacity
- Power Walk: Backed by the thumping anachronism of a track "Fever Dream." This Troper's girlfriend referred to it immediately as "the guitars of war".
- Shut Up Hannibal: This Is Sparta!
- Smug Snake: Theron.
- Sorting Algorithm Of Evil: Partially subverted; after the first wave fails, Xerxes immediately sends his best troops, the Immortals.... but they aren't any good, either, so it's more like a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Space Jews: the Persians, a bizarre example, as the group in question are essentially a grotesquely fantasised version of a culture which is still supposed to represent that culture.
- Spear Carrier
- Sword Fight: Leonidas vs Uber-Immortal.
- The Spartan Way: 'Nuff said.
- This Is SPARTA: Duh.
- Unreliable Narrator: The whole movie is Dilios telling a campfire story to boost morale. As Frank Miller put it, he doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
- We Have Reserves: Lampshaded when Xerexes says "Imagine what horrible fate awaits your troops when I would gladly kill half my own men for victory."
- Also, when the Captain is asked about the presence of his young son within the (doomed) group, he simply replies: "I have others."
