Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller (the same guy who wrote Sin City), about the Battle of Thermopylae. A behind-the-scenes featurette is here.
That looks surreal. That man has a wacky mind.
New trailer! This one has less of Leonidas' backstory than the first one, but it's just as cool, and the resolution is WAY better!
Was this the battle Dr. Bashir talked to Ezri Dax about at the end of WYLB?
Yeah, I believe so.
Yes it was.
Thank you both. :-)
Has anyone else read the book? I was kinda curious if they were going to retain the book's nudity, but I guess the trailer answers that question.
1:16 fight clip, bookended by commentary by stars Gerard Butler and Zack Snyder.
I'm sorry to say this, but I was really distracted by the ridiculous CGI blood spurts. It didn't look realistic, and made it hard to enjoy. I wish they'd have gone with something a bit more low key and believable. The fight choreography looked pretty good, though. I hope that CGI blood isn't too prominent.
I read the book last week. Pretty good. I'm disappointed that Frank Miller, despite being a great storyteller, skimps on the drawing, but I'm still looking forward to seeing it. I was pleased to see that many lines of dialogue that I had seen in the trailer were in the book, letting you know how faithful the book will be.
While some of you may have seen the movie by now, for those of you who haven't, there is another trailer, about two and a half minutes long, here. WARNING: It contains a few shots of exploding bursts of blood during battle scenes (though the CGI used to make them is so fake that it hardly caused me any trouble, personally), and a few shots of topless women.
The other half of the clip (it's five and a half minutes is total) is blank, but according to this source, a shot of something else is at the 1:52 mark in the trailer itself.
Very good movie, though a bit over the top with gore and SFX, but it wasn't a surprise considering the producer. Is there any historic truth to this movie? I read somewhere that there was an older movie about this same story, but it rare to find on tape anywhere. Has anybody else heard/read this before?
The Battle of Thermopylae was indeed real, and Frank Miller was indeed inspired by an older movie called The 300 Spartans when he wrote/illustrated the graphic novel. I believe Wikipedia's article on it has more info.
Thank you Luigi. I know the Persian Empire was vast in its day, but did it reach so far as to include part of the Orient? Was gunpowder even invented when this battle occured? Those guys with the silver masks, which were called immortals I believe, seemed to be similar to samuri, at least their swords were anyway.
I don't think I've seen/heard about that battle tactic the Spartans first used before. Great movie!
The Persian Empire only extended to the western parts of India at best. They had nothing to do with China or Japan. While there really was a unit in the Persian army called the Immortals, the version portrayed in this movie is an invention of Frank Miller. The only similarity is that both groups covered their faces.
Which tactic are you talking about? Was it the Spartans setting up in a narrow area to negate the Persians' numerical advantage, or their using a phalanx and pushing the enemy back? In the first case, they weren't the first to do it, as the Athenians used that tactic at Marathon, where they managed to envelop the Persians. In the second case, phalanxes were the typical Greek tactic, where two armies would push each other, stabbing with rows of spears, until one side broke and ran.
The phalanx tactic was the one I've not seen before. I suppose if I had done some research I probably would've come across it but I was leaning more toward not seeing it in a movie. Speaking of which, how did it get the term "phalanx?" Isn't that a mythical bird? The modern phalanx is a 20mm gatling gun on naval vessils.
I didn't think the Persian Empire extended into the Orient so thanks for clearing that up Chris. Did it include Egypt and northern Africa as well? I ask because the man-god (Xercies?) had an Egyptian look to him; plus pharos were also considered gods.
The 20mm gun is named after the ancient military formation.
See Wikipedia.
In other news, Iran has declared war on Warner Brothers over the portrayal of the Persians...
You learn something every day; a plural for phalanx is phalanges, which is another name for fingers.
Iran must have a boring daily schedule: enrich uranium, spread propaganda, declare war on somebody...
The trailer makes it look like that one guy only has a few word vocabulary and that one of his limited vocab words is Spartan which must be why he says it every few seconds...
I hope that's not representative of how the actual movie is...
Saw this movie last night. LOVED it. Frank Miller must be proud. It's one of the best adaptations of a graphic novel I've ever seen, and it not only did a good job of fully realizing the material from the book, right down to lots of actual panel shots and lines of dialogue, and Lynn Varley's colors brought to cinematic life by the bluescreen/greenscreen backgrounds, but also in the added material that was not in the book: Queen Gorgo and Theron's politicking, the scene in which Leonidas is teaching his kid to fight, the HILARIOUS scene in which Leonidas eats an apple as he and his men finish off the felled Persians lying on the ground during a lull in the fighting while talking about being "civil" with his mouth half full, etc. Queen Gorgo got some added depth as a result.
The cinematography was a bit overbearing as a whole, and might've benefited from a bit more quiet and subtlety here and there, but I suppose I can bear it with this one war/action movie out of the so many I've seen. The use of the three cameras at different speeds to film the scene in which the Spartans ram their shields into the charging "Immortals" was one well-justified use of the over-adrenalized cinematography. I also like the golden, grainy texture of the actor's skin, which was also afforded, I assume, by the camerawork.
While there was a certain bombast in the adaptation, some might say it was justified by the material, and Leonidas' answer to Xerxes envoys in the beginning of the film was one of the film's BEST IMPROVEMENTS over the book. Indeed, I think in terms of the material, the movie was better than the book, which was certainly not my feeling with say, V for Vendetta or Sin City. On the flip side, one scene that worked okay, but which I think would've worked better without narration, was the scene toward the end when Xerxes' speaker gives Leonidas one last opportunity to submit to him, and during Leonidas' apparent pondering of the offer, we see a number of shots, including beads of sweat rolling down his neck. I think those shots could've stood on their own.
I found it a bit disappointing that the production felt the need to make Xerxes so effeminate, with the makeup, plucked eyebrows, and tranny-like voice, as if the only way they could provoke the audience's antipathy towards him was with androgeny, and I wonder why the LGBTS community thought of that.
Why would Theron carry the Persian gold on him? Stupid move on his part. Then again, so was betraying the queen.
Yeah, I immediately thought that was silly, but obviously it was to make it clear to the assembled of his treachery. Kinda of a short cut through logic (not to mention the physics of weight--how much could all of that gold have weighed?), but it got the point across. Perhaps it might've sufficed to have one or two coins fall from him, and have one of the assembled pick them up and show them around?
An interesting negative critique of the movie, touching upon both the historical inaccuracies (in particular the portrayal of Middle Easterners) and the androgeny of the performance of Xerxes that I mentioned. I also didn't know that Ephialtes was a real historical figure (though not, according to The Moor Next Door, portrayed accurately in the film).
LOL. A PG version of the film's trailer.
is it like 2 seconds?
Just watch it. It's funny.
One thing I thought was that the bottomless pit that the envoy is kicked into should've been filled with brightly colored plastic balls, like that kid's playpen you see in amusement parks and playrooms.
the heck line was funny, but I thought a lot of it wasn't... It's silliness bordered on trying to hard to be silly making them stupid changes...
Monty Python and the 300 Grail. LOL.
I watched this movie's predecessor 300 Spartans, made in 1962 I believe, and even though it's the same story the differences are like night and day. Naturally there would be differences with the advancements in cinematography but it's nice to see this story reborn. One change of note is the line "then we shall fight in the shade" when one of Xerxes' heralds tells the Spartans their "arrows will blot out the sun," in the older movie this was spoken by Leonidas and not one of his soliders.
As far as the historical accuracy of this movie goes, they did actually wear armor, which is somewhat more effective than bare chests, and while it is true that the battle of Thermopylae only included 300 Spartans, it also include several thousand soldiers from Athens and other major cities in Greece. So the significance of the tale of the 300 is really less the bravery of the Spartan soldiers in standing so few against the Persian onslaught, but rather the cheapness of the Spartan government in sending so few soldiers when all the rest of Greece was sending massive armies.
Also, each of the Spartans had a different design on their shield. One famous one had a life-sized fly design on his. When asked why, he said something along the lines of, "I plan to get so close to the enemy, it will look like a lion!"
Does anyone know if the part about the oracle, the priests, and Leonidas' political rivals, and their reasons for not allowing him to go to war with the Spartan army proper is at all true? If so, then their reasons were political, and not about being cheap.
I'm not a historian but I'm fairly certain that the Spartans were very spiritual/superstitous and relied on the oracle a great deal, even though their 'visions' were usually drug induced. Leonidas didn't particularly trust the priests, and it turned out that they really were taking bribes from the Persians, but he was bound by thier suggestions because most of the senators still belived in them. I admit though that I obtained this information from a History Channel spotlight on The Battle of Thermopylae almost a month ago.
Roger Ebert's review of the film, which he didn't get to write last year because of his medical difficulties at the time.