300
Overview
Three hundred men walk into a mountain pass to die, and the movie treats it like the best decision they ever made. Zack Snyder shot Frank Miller's graphic novel almost panel for panel, all bronze skin, billowing red cloaks, and blood that sprays like ink. Gerard Butler's Leonidas doesn't really converse with people — he roars at them, most famously when a Persian messenger gets kicked into a pit and "This is Sparta!" entered the permanent vocabulary of gyms everywhere. The plot is simple on purpose: Xerxes, a towering god-king dripping with gold (Rodrigo Santoro, unrecognizable), wants Sparta to kneel, and Sparta would rather be annihilated beautifully. Back home, Lena Headey's Queen Gorgo fights the dirtier political war, and honestly her scenes have aged the best of anything in the film. Is it historically accurate? Not even slightly, and it doesn't care for a second. The slow-motion spear work, the shield-wall choreography, the thundering score — it's pure myth-making, a war comic shouted at full volume. It made over 450 million dollars, launched a wave of imitators and parodies, and people are still quoting it nearly twenty years later.
