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I think I may have to be the grumpy old man on this one. I generally enjoyed 300. I thought the 20 minutes in the middle that were nonstop action were pretty fun, but the rest of it just turned this really great book and really amazing historical incident into a very normal, run of the mill period film with wannabee hans Zimmer music (women humming anyone?) playing over people in wheat fields. We are made to sympathize with the king the way we must sympathize with every other character in every movie ever, we keep cutting back to his wife and kid. This also paces it like every other epic period movie. We keep cutting away from the 300 men in the battle to other random shit I don't care about. I think this could have been a much better 80 minute movie that stuck to the battle on the hill. I think the word for word narration from the book was annoying and uneccesarry. There's a reason some things are books, and some things aren't. If every comic book movie had the narration from the books in it, Wolverine would be telling us who he is and how he got his powers at teh beginning of every fucking scene.

Also, I would have appreciated if some of this movie wasn't in slow motion. Absolutely all of the action is either slow or fast motion, and large parts of the dialogue were too. So a guy would say something and then we'd see a slo mo shot of him dropping a spear, slo mo waves of the ocean, and a slo mo close up of his eyes, and this shit would make it take three minutes for someone to say one sentence.

 

Anyways, it's not that I didn't like it, I thought a lot of it was fun. But one of the things that's so great about the book is that if gives the Spartans so little humanity, paints them as much less sympathetic characters and the book itself is so lean and efficient and will show you none of it's character's weaknesses, the book's very form is like a fucking spartan phalanx. I could give a fuck if they change the book, I personally think that these movies should barely resemble the books, but every change that they made and everything that they did add was for the purposes of either making something look cooler (mutants and weird goats and whatever the fuck) which I didn't mind as much; or to make the spartans seem more sympathetic, structure the movie more conventionally, or give us a break from the battle. These are all things I think the book was very careful not to do.

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Hmm, this is V for Vendetta all over again for me. An enjoyable, visually impressive movie, that's superficially faithful to the comic book source, except were V was marketed to Liberal idiots, this is geared for Right-Wing assholes.

 

Apologies to anyone here who liked it, but that's the way it is. On the plus side, Junker, you are no longer the grumpy old man.

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i saw this last night. i think the best way to sum it up is boring. overacted, overstylized, overslowmotionized. it was really horrible. and i could've used less touchy feely moments and more fighting. they're fucking spartans, if i wanted to see people being all in love with each other, i'll watch the notebook. it also seemed like they were trying to make it into this epic folk historic war movie but it falls very flat. and the dialogue was very cliche, corny, and occasionally long-winded. it was like braveheart meets gladiator meets mtv meets a 12-year old boy's version of a cool action movie meets the pointless narration at the beginning and ending of every episode of heroes. the guys were hot though.

 

also, with everyone saying how badass the queen was...

she fucking cheated on her husband and slept with some douchebag to get what she wanted...yeah, that's someone to really look up to.

 

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so...so it might not make your movie of the year, is what im hearing. i could be misunderstanding.

 

Jont has a point, i felt that way at some points. I get that spartans were hardcore, that military might and one-dimensional emotionless was cooler than moving in real-time, but honestly, machismo to that extent borders on satire.

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Jont has a point, i felt that way at some points. I get that spartans were hardcore, that military might and one-dimensional emotionless was cooler than moving in real-time, but honestly, machismo to that extent borders on satire.

 

Exactly, they're human beings. God of War's Kratos, arguably one of the biggest badasses in pop culture history (and a Spartan as well) felt compassion for his family.

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fine, then make a movie about the spartan lifestyle and how compassionate they are toward their families or whatever. but when you call a movie 300, i don't care to see any of that. i think the whole incident is fascinating in and of itself without having to relate or empathize with the characters.

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fine, then make a movie about the spartan lifestyle and how compassionate they are toward their families or whatever. but when you call a movie 300, i don't care to see any of that. i think the whole incident is fascinating in and of itself without having to relate or empathize with the characters.

 

So... you complain that the fight scenes were shallow and like something a 12-year-old would think was cool (I'll have you know that 12-year-old likes to be called Frank Miller) yet you hated giving the characters and storyline depth? I'm honestly not being an ass her, I'm just seriously wondering what exactly you're wanting here.

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So... you complain that the fight scenes were shallow and like something a 12-year-old would think was cool (I'll have you know that 12-year-old likes to be called Frank Miller) yet you hated giving the characters and storyline depth? I'm honestly not being an ass her, I'm just seriously wondering what exactly you're wanting here

 

first off, i didn't say the fight scenes were shallow, i said they were overstylized, over-slowmotionized, and boring. if a movie is about a battle and that battle comes off as kind of lame because the moviemakers want to marry slowmotion and have ten thousand of it's babies, then i'm not going to be happy. i don't think i would have minded all the more emotional parts if the battle scenes were more exciting. but it just seemed to bog the movie down even more and make the spartans seem much less badass.

 

and when i made the 12-year old comment, i was talking about all the non-stop slow motion battle scene parts, not frank miller. slow motion is cool when used sparingly and in the appropriate places. this was just ridiculous and made the battle scenes seem not only slower-paced but cheesy.

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that battle comes off as kind of lame because the moviemakers want to marry slowmotion and have ten thousand of it's babies,

If I haven't already FHD'd you for your review in this thread earlier today, that line would have done it for sure. "Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost sixty thousand dollars. Pass the asparagus." Good times.

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also, with everyone saying how badass the queen was...

she fucking cheated on her husband and slept with some douchebag to get what she wanted...yeah, that's someone to really look up to.

 

 

Well...

 

 

She didn't cheat on her husband. She did it for him, to save him. Not cause she liked its. Whatever-his-name-is knew that she would see it that way and used it, used her. She was raped in a manner even though she agreed to it. Besides that moment, she's got balls. Which is what I thought was cool.

 

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i see aoi's point, but....

 

the chick did cheat, though for political reasons, and i cant say she was raped.

 

 

i woudlve liked more of the battle itself, and i was talkin to ridicuolous-ass LL about how we both noticed during the battles it felt like a few dozen poeple on screen tops, not the swarming masses you saw in say Braveheart. Anyway, im going to start doing things around the house in slow, then fast motion and see if it works out for me.

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You people make it sound like this movie isn't about the epic battle between spartans & Persians. Granted i haven't read the source material and we touched ever-so briefly(or my attention span was that short in yr 11) on this battle in Ancient History, but what does politics &

cheating women

got to do with sweaty man-battles?

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