300 Movie Review

This is the movie that everyone has been buzzing about. I was looking forward to seeing this for a long time, and even with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 61% as of last night, I was still as eager to see it as I was when I first read the synopsis. The movie is the next of Frank Miller's graphic novels to get the movie treatment, and here's my review:

I had done a lot of reading about this movie before I saw it, and pretty much everyone came to the same consensus: it was kind of boring, but it looked amazing. After seeing it, I only partially agree with that. I thought the story, which is a retelling of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, was actually fascinating. The whole story felt very Shakespearean in it's telling. Full of internal conflict, and a great juxtaposition of duty, courage, pride, and honor vs. cruelty, arrogance, and ego. The first 20 minutes or so of the movie I thought were great, and they got me to totally buy into it. However, that only took me until about 20 minutes left, and then I unfortunately felt some of that boredom everyone was talking about.

Almost needless to say, I thought the movie looked great, and aside from a few instances of "wow, that was bad CGI," It looked amazing. Granted this thing is mostly digital effects, I imagine in order to get every scene perfect, it would have taken about 10 years. But most looked amazing. Also, the battle scene's were awesome; as riveting as I had hoped, but there just weren't enough of them. Overall, there were tons of things I loved about this movie.

What I didn't like is a much shorter list than what I did, but still more than I had hoped. I thought Gerald Butler, the Spartan King, did a great job, but his Scottish accent peeked through too much and was a bit distracting at times. The dialogue was also a bit corny at times and didn't fit in some other places, but I got around that. I caught myself thinking about that line from Swingers, "everyone copies from everyone in movies" a few times. Most of it was from Lord of the Rings though, and if you're going to copy a movie, it might as well be that one. Also, there's only so much you can put in slow motion before it just gets ridiculous. This thing would have been 45 minutes long if it was sped up. The action was awesome in slo-mo, but somethings just didn't need to be slowed down. Again, the CGI moments, and my feeling that there just wasn't enough action. I think the action was by far the best part.

Overall, I did honestly enjoy this movie. I can see why it's getting a 61% on RT because I think it's almost a hate it or love it type movie. On the Reganometer, I give this movie an 8 out of 10, and say if you liked Sin City, love movies that have great action and that are visually stunning, and can let yourself buy into certain things and ignore some others, you will love it.