If the ancient Greeks had had helicopters, this could've been
Black Hawk Down. Like that movie, this was just straight War Porn, all senseless, glorious slaughter of a faceless enemy caricatured into a force of pure malevolent Evil. I pretty much expected that going in, so I just sat back and soaked in the spectacle. As spectacle, it was OK. The DVD case had a quote comparing it to the original
Matrix. Please. (The leering god-king Xerxes looked like he wandered off the set of
Stargate.)
I hated the politics of
300. There's no escaping the parallels with contemporary global relations, however much the filmmakers might protest. Well, 300 was based on a
comic book graphic novel, while Black Hawk Down was based on a series of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so I'm not sure what that means.
(Oh, yeah: and this was another one of those
movies starring a member of the cast of The Lord of the Rings and based on a comic book graphic novel. This one had
Faramir in it.)
1 comment:
I've never understood the appeal of Black Hawk Down. The incident was relentlessly humiliating, and was essentially a prefiguring of the Iraq quagmire. The pretty-boy star Legolas just falls out of a helicopter and is on his back the rest of the movie. Most of the leads are played by well-known foreign actors - British, Scottish, Australian. The movie ends with our guys running away. No wonder this was Saddam Hussein's favorite movie. Yet it's equally popular with wingnuts I know.
MAD Magazine skewered 300 perfectly when it asks why Leonidas makes such a big deal about formation fighting and holding ground, yet in battle everyone basically runs around and does their own thing.
Now, imagine if the Spartans had followed the Powell plan in the first place, rather than initially sending in a too-small fighting force followed by a later surge.
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