Film: 300 Frank Millers Retelling

[ChemicalBeauty]

Iran outraged by Hollywood war epic Tue Mar 13, 8:09 AM ET

War epic "300", a smash hit in the United States for its gory portrayal of the Greco-Persian wars, has drawn the wrath of Iranians for showing their ancestors as bloodthirsty "savages".

The press, officials and bloggers have united in denouncing the film as another example of "psychological warfare" against Tehran by its American arch enemy at a time of mounting tension over its nuclear programme.

"Hollywood declares war on Iranians," said the headline in the reformist daily Ayandeh-No of the film which tells the story of the 300 Spartan soldiers fighting off ancient Persians in the Battle of Thermopylae.

"It seeks to tell people that Iran, which is in the Axis of Evil now, has for long been the source of evil and modern Iranians' ancestors are the ugly murderous dumb savages you see in '300'," fumed the paper on its front page.

A cultural advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the film as "American psychological warfare against Iran."

"American cultural officials thought they could get mental satisfaction by plundering Iran's historic past and insulting this civilization," Javad Shamaghdari told semi-official Fars news agency.

Three MPs in the Iranian parliament have also written to the foreign ministry to protest to the production and screening of this "anti-Iranian Hollywood film".

The film has already proved a major box office hit in the United States and, unsurprisingly, Greece.

It is highly improbable the film would ever be screened in the Islamic republic but contraband DVDs of the latest American movies are often available on the streets no sooner that they are internationally released.

Cyber savvy Iranians have already started online petitions and set off "Google bombs" against "300".

The furore over "300" is by no means the first time Iran has been left fuming over Western portrayals of its ancient history.

Iranians were also enraged by the 2004 epic 'Alexander' about the conquest of the Persian Empire and a notorious 2005 British newspaper review of an exhibition of antiquities which branded ancient Persia the "Evil Empire".

Copyright © 2007 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/2007031...n&printer=1;_ylt=Au0H01TPTcDgVRHtx7UKlPKbOrgF

 

[JerryBlunted]

what will they think of miller if he actually finishes "holy terror, batman?" in which batman supposedly beats down an al qaeda-like terror cell. see, that actually is about this conflict, this other story really isn't.

 

[Pander Bear]

depends: if they give the batman suit nipples, Iran will probably never see it.

 

[JerryBlunted]

me neither, though

 

[lurkerguy]

Persians aren't southern Africans.

The whole film is laughable.

The film makes it out like Greeks are supermen, and Persians are monkeys.

Highly fucking insulting to both south Africans, and Persians.

 

[drrty grrl]

Saw it @ IMAX here in town- was blown away! Not the best movie I've ever seen but one of the best I've seen in a long time. Thought the acting was great- Gerard Butler has finally gotten his name out there- the music, colors, graphics... scantilly clad, muscle bound guys-- YEP this movie is awesome!
The only difference I would make is to take out the comic book aspect-- the monsters/animals.... and make it a little more fact based. Some of the facts were exaggerated a little. Overall- Highly recommended! :D

 

[Pander Bear]

Lurkerguy and I agree: creepy Actual history is just more interesting to me, I guess.

Here's a fun link from some stuffy ivory tower egg-head

Sparta, Spandex and Disturbing Distortions of '300'
By Ephraim Lytle
University of Toronto


The battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is the movie "300"? Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, has seen it and offers his view. This article first appeared in the Toronto Star and is republished here with permission.

History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.

We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.

And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan "freedom." By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.

Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta's highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas' campaign, despite 300's subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300's Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers.

Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark.

300's Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan's education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb "to Spartanize" meant "to bugger." In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.

This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus' time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.

No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.

This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.

 

[drrty grrl]

^Thanks for that article. My dad is a very large history nerd, so he was pretty much telling me the stuff in the article throughout the movie. It's all for entertainment anyway & I was entertained. I would be happy if someone indeed made a fact based movie though....

 

[AndyChrist]

Iran outraged by Hollywood war epic

I fucking LOVE this story.

Apparently, Iranians think a WHOLE lot more of Americans than I do. I wouldn't assume that even one small percent of Americans know that Iran used to be Persia.

 

[solistus]

^^^
Very true, and also the first thing I thought of re: the Iran being pissed thing.

Of course this movie wasn't historically accurate - it's Frank freaking Miller, not the History Channel. The fight scenes and special effects were fantastic, the acting was solid and the soundtrack was excellent and had a nice blend of classical and modern styles.

I also don't think the movie glorified Spartan culture to the extent some seem to think it did, although I wish it hadn't glossed over the existence of helots in Sparta. The whole "we're fighting for freedom" thing seemed sort of ironic, yes, but the movie showed both sides. The depictions of infanticide and agoge were hardly glorified; they were depicted starkly, which is Miller's style.

It's important to recognise that the narration was never represented as objective; it was usually shown to be a Spartan giving a retelling. Of course, the Spartans were 'selective' in how they interpreted their own culture, just like every culture is (one could say the same things about Americans "fighting for freedom" while passing laws like the PATRIOT Act).

I'm a hardcore leftist, and I had no qualms with any political or cultural messages in the film. It was clearly meant to be an entertaining action piece, not a sober reflective commentary, and what elements do exist to be read into are ambiguous enough to allow one to come to one's own conclusions.

I can't remember if it was on this thread of off of IMDB, but apparently the director was asked about the political implications of the film by two reporters after its press screening. One asked if Xerxes was meant to represent Bush. The other thought Leonidas was supposed to be Bush. This pretty well sums up my ambiguity argument.

 

[pennywise]

five stars....incredible

 

[9mmCensor]

Persians aren't southern Africans.

The whole film is laughable.

The film makes it out like Greeks are supermen, and Persians are monkeys.

Highly fucking insulting to both south Africans, and Persians.

Opposed to the reality of the Spartans being a highly trained, equipped, coordinated and motivated fighting unit, that used the terrain as a tactical advantage to repel a numerically superior but less motivated and not as well equipped army, until surrounded.

 

[Pander Bear]

So it being half correct makes up for characters I have no empathy with, and a plot that never gets off the ground?

 

[TALLY]

great fucking movie. 5 stars

 

[L2R]

so i'm drinking last night, and fancyfresh can't keep her fucking eyes open for any kind of film, so after she took off to bed i watched a bootleg copy of this.

maybe it was the liquor, but i really couldn't see anything special in this film whatsoever. it's a special effects run non stop action film which extends it's run time by initiating plot developement that has little or nothing to do with the main focus of the film.

maybe a sobre and/or cinema screening might make it change but so far 2/5

 

[TALLY]

^yeah, i saw the bootleg version of the mobie off the internet too...stilll 6 stars if i had the choice. Good fucking story.

 

[L2R]

what story?

 

[Fatty Fungai]

moment a saaw the add for that i was tellin everyone about it. it looks fuckin sweet. cant wait.

 

[tambourine-man]

so i'm drinking last night, and fancyfresh can't keep her fucking eyes open for any kind of film, so after she took off to bed i watched a bootleg copy of this.

maybe it was the liquor, but i really couldn't see anything special in this film whatsoever. it's a special effects run non stop action film which extends it's run time by initiating plot developement that has little or nothing to do with the main focus of the film.

maybe a sobre and/or cinema screening might make it change but so far 2/5

I'm disappointed but not entirely surprised by that.

Bummer.

 

[L2R]

but on a plus side, every time i heard the phrase "no retreat no surrender", i wondered where the karate kid was.

i mean, seriously it was every other fucking line!

"let's go to war! no retreat no surrender!"
....
"train hard little boy, but remember, no retreat no surrender!"
....
"honey would you like some more peas?" "peas? fuck yes! no retreat no surrender!"
....
"do you take this woman to be your bride?" "rooaar! no retr...."
....


you get the point