Phoenix TV Blog: 300

300 (2007)

I decided to see this movie after hearing positive vibes i.e. it was superior to Troy and the great reviews. I knew it would be the typical ancient goodies versus badies only we are replacing the Trojans with the Spartans and the Greeks with the Persians. I also anticipated visual genius and impressive cgi. Apart from that I didn’t know what to expect.

Essentially this movie directed by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, takes place some 2400 years ago and the ancient kingdom of Sparta in all its stage 1 survival status glory, faces conquer by Persia. King Leonidas (Gerard Butler whom I barely recognised from Dracula 2000) has refused to submit to Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) who commands an army of millions. Leonidas defies an old priest and the oracle and goes to war with 300 of his elite warriors – Sparta is well known for extremely intense training of males from an early age due to its philosophy. After Leonidas has left, his wife the Queen (Lena Headey who was in the live action version of The Jumgle Book all those years ago) has to take great measures to send every last man to join him to prevent the inevitable domination of Sparta (only the women will be spared) by Persia.

The visual styles used throughout 300 merit admiration. The scenery is stunning and the cgi impressive and sophisticated. The battle scenes are a stampede of crunching guitar blasts, Lord of the Rings elephants, Scream masked armies and violent decapitations. In the pictures it was truly adrenaline pumping and pretty overwhelming most of the time. It is simple blood crazed action galore. Butler’s Leonidas is the typical loyal to his country, ultra aggressive, would sacrifice his whole army for his woman type leader whom we are rooting for – six packs and oak tree thighs included. Xerxes is a behemoth, androgynous god king who just wants it all. When we aren’t seeing legions upon legions of masked, cloaked (even grotesque) men being skewered by 300 skimpily dressed models in red capes, the rest of the movie I found pretty boring. The ending left a lot to be desired as well.

SPOILER BEGIN

After walking out of the cinema the majority of boys were ranting on about how funny it was to see a man get his head sliced off when he wasn’t looking and how cool the monster man was. I also overheard some women talking about what a strong character the queen was.

I felt enraged by what I saw in this film. From the very start we see what it meant to be a man in ancient times. We see Leonidas as young as a toddler being taught to fight with a sword and take throw downs. When boys reach the age of 7 they are taken from their families and trained intensively to be super soldiers, enduring extreme violence, brutality and torture in order to desensitise them to feeling, to bend them to their ruler’s will and to entangle them into a lifelong bondage as a human weapon of defence and provision for women with no choices. To cap it off young Leonidas has to face nature in its fury. To be abandoned by his country – to face the final hurdles towards becoming a ‘real’ man. In this case a giant, demonic wolf. Only once a man has survived the nightmare and the boy (i.e. feelings) is fully driven out of him and he has sworn himself to the protection by the sword of his country (Sparta) is he allowed back into his country and permitted access to women.

The violence against boys - especially that young – really made me look at the world today and how little we care for the lives of men. After seeing all the bloodshed and war, a feminist no doubt- would call this some testosterone fuelled feud of little boys or the like. At least we are shown with hideous brutality that men are not born monsters but are rather controlled by their moulded moral code which in this case is to operate entirely on what their DNA tells them to – resulting in the classic Stage 1 survival status of society where men are the providers and protectors while women are the home keepers and child raisers. Feminists would call this ‘oppression of women’ with regards no doubt to education and male power in society. Of course it is palpably obvious that while both men and women were restricted in their roles due to the need for survival, that it was men who were by far the more oppressed sex. Three times at least. Being born a man in those times, 50-100 years ago and even now in many places is to be born into bondage of a far more daunting prospect of raising children and being kept in the house and what have you – DEATH!. What could be more oppressing than being brought up to be cannon fodder? Skilled cannon fodders perhaps? Ancient Greece did indeed appear to be one of the only countries that admired male beauty but while female beauty is admired as it is – not what they do – men’s bodies were painted in how they functioned – much like an attractive rapier or rifle. To be a man in those days was a slave. So were women but not as much. Men were oppressed more than women were – by other men i.e. by the very small percentage of men at the top rank who control society. All other men are drones.

Even this blatant fact about men’s heritage as a pose to the dominated subject of ‘women as property’ and ‘oppression of women’ did not matter at all to the thousands of people watching it. All that mattered was the entertainment derived from seeing hundreds of men brutally killed and dismembered. We are now so immune to male suffering and death that the poor man ‘who had never felt the warmth of a woman’ who has his head sliced clean of his head, caused an outburst of laughter and applause in the cinema. People bask in the glory of that 300 strong phalanx drilling those dehumanised, shadowy Persians. Compare this to today when the government calls sending hundreds of troops off to Iraq i.e. murder, glory – fighting for their country (which like Sparta is referred to as ‘her’ or ‘she’). Feminists and their Trojan horses ramble on about women being denied the vote when the fact of the matter was that men were only granted access to the vote when and only when they had sworn themselves to the military service of England. So women never really earned the vote. The vote itself was essentially the condemning of men to death realistically.

And the role of women in this film is what really hammered this movie for me and makes for a lot of interesting points. It was very interesting to note that Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the Suffragettes who committed offence and martyr for the right to sentence men to death by the sword and rifle, actually turned cheerleader when World War 2 was announced, egging men on to fight for their country. Indeed an approximately equal number of women voted for the war in that era (not that there was much discussion) and the same in the recent war. Queen Gorgo is being celebrated on every review board and discussion topic as being a ‘strong woman.’ A victory for female viewers who are so fed up with the passive and weak female characters in other ancient epics e.g. Troy and Gladiator (which was by far superior to both films) But just what is a strong woman? Read Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say or Why Men Are The Way They Are and you will really understand the difference between male power which is the area where women feel powerless and female power which is the area where men feel helpless. In other words the area of power which feminists associate with real power is the realm of men and because the queen dares to barge into the world of men there is this sort of awkward, ‘something doesn’t feel right’ vibe given off by her actions. Women mistakenly confuse this with power or ‘women’s lib.’

I admit I am rambling on here so I will say that I found Lena Headley’s character to be absolutely abhorrent. It was purely because she was beautiful and was ‘woman’ that she so easily had Leonidas right under her thumb. Leonidas is a strong man. He and his 300 Spartans are the very essence – the very meaning of indomitable spirit and determination! He was also extremely powerful and aggressive. Only his iron moral code and CPU in his balls that the poor women are alive in the first place. Is keeping such powerful men under control via approval, love and sexual intimacy (which are in fact the primary motivators of men) not what power is? When people say Gorgo matches her husband for strength – THIS is what they mean, if only subconsciously. She can bark at and insult the Persian Messengers as much as she wants but she is holding no sway over them as far as male power is concerned i.e. the ‘girl power’ fantasies’ – she is simply manipulating her husband and the Spartan men by playing to their inherent chivalry by causing conflict between the Spartans and Persians. You can call Gorgo a role model of ‘girl power’ but feminist’s political correctness falls under the weight of its inconsistencies. War is a two sex situation.

“Only Spartan Women give birth to real men,” Queen Gorgo taunts (she does this a lot) the Persian messengers before having the desired effect of enraging Leonidas by insulting his queen and subsequently being pushed into a hole. She isn't a strong woman. She played a vital part in starting a war!

Gorgo like so many ancient women back then had her husband by the balls. She had total control over him. She was like all women, a victim. Oh how terrible it is dear women for your son to be taken from you so young! It is such a painful time for the women. Yes and the boys themselves are spared no such tender feelings or empathy. They are physically and socially conditioned from birth to serve woman to the death and embrace the rage of a god when ever she is threatened or upset. That is what real power is.

In one scene before the great battles we are given an unnecessary dosage of male demonisation – in the form of a lecherous old priest who resembles Palpatine with “the desires of men.” His licking and sexual abuse of the oracle – a painfully corny scene with a white clothed teenage girl jerking around the air as if being raped is amplified by his betrayal of Sparta as he has been in league with Xerxes before Leonidas consulted him. I don’t know if these scenes were historically accurate but I am told that the next Gorgo scandal was not included in the novel.

It really made me sick to see clearly when Gorgo makes her appearance again after the first battle scenes, the obvious difference between good men and bad men. The only good men as far as she and the rest of Sparta is concerned are the ones who fit Leonidas and his warrior’s description which I have detailed above – also known as ‘real men.’ The bad man is the man who refuses to go to war. I don’t know why the council was opposed to the Battle of Thermopylae etcetera but the ‘strong woman’ was apparently the only one who wished to risk the insanity of sacrificing every last man to fend off Persia. To do this it apparently took more than being born with a vagina to accomplish this – to convince the old farts in the council to give the green light for doomsday for the last man. After all what is a life of shifting water pales and wiping babies bottoms got to match the old farts who have by some strike of luck survived battles and had the luxury of thinking for themselves as a result (I am thinking about Plato and Aristotle – with all these ‘strong women’ about how come there were never any female Socrates around?)?

This is where the 2 men come in. Both high up in the council – one good and one bad. The good man is the man who keeps his distance from her and treats her as his superior because of her status and apparently has less power than the other man. The other man, Theron (Dominic West who does a great job of demonising the male gender) is apparently against the war. Yes he’s a sexual predator, a money grabber and a traitor but he is against battle nonetheless. He is a prime example of what a bad man is. Through privilege or status it is likely he escaped the inhumanity of being born male and the indoctrination process and it would be a total disaster to the film and its Political Correctness for him to be a good man and at the same time against the war. Compare this 60 years ago when men who did not fight for their country were ostracised and labelled cowards and given pink flowers or even imprisoned. Because of his demands for sex as compensation for his support in the council we see the only woman in the film (besides female villagers and Xerxes’ harlots) suffering. Apparently her suffering was worse than all the men in the film suffering – the young boys being whipped and the men being turned into human (if even that) kebabs combined.

In the court she essentially says to the room of men: “Ok please for the sake of glory and greatness, will you mortal men go and sacrifice yourself in the battlefield for us poor innocent women so that we do not have to face the prospect of unwanted sex and slavery.” Apparently the morality of women is superior to men. And the act of forcing a woman to have unwanted sex is a far more serious crime than taking the life of a man. Saying in not so many words to a room of Stage 1 women: Ok please for the sake of your beauty and sex appeal will all your woman please have sex with all of us men” would leave the men shivering outside the house until they apologised. The vanity of women at its most blatant. Despicable. The way she stabs Theron to death when he betrays her, while taunting him (the “GO GIRL” moment being linked to the similar taunting Gorgo suffered at the hands of Theron before their sex) and the way all the men call him a traitor seeing the gold in his robes was the point where women squeal with delight at the justice done against this monstrous man. The vicious slap in the face would just have been starters. Even a lot of men would say: “the bastard so deserved that.” Thanks to Darren for that observation who said: “as though the act of a woman agreeing to unwanted sex was worse than the taking of a man’s life.”

It seemed unrealistic to me. Wouldn’t she be manipulating him with sex in order to gain his support? That was the real power women had in those days (and still have – the problem being they are refusing to give it up). It would have at least reduced the demonisation of men enough for this film to be considered a realistic account of men’s heritage and the survival struggle of the ancient times.

SPOILER END

In conclusion this is a simple minded and visually impressive ‘in your face’ movie. Nothing wrong with that though it does get boring at times (not as boring as Troy mind you) and especially after seeing it once. A good watch if you want Sin City like action and tending from good to college level acting. For me the violence against men and boys along with the unappealing nature of the queen made me question myself whether I would have seen it for the first time knowing these facts.

Answer: Doubtful