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I was reading TIME in partnership with CNN. I read an article about 300, so I thought it might be good to share it with you guys.

Like a bunch of super-butch Greeks storming Thermopylae, but with fewer casualties and a different ending, the no-star antique war drama 300 triumphed at the box office last weekend. Director Zack Snyder's adaptation of the graphic novel by Frank Miller (Sin City) pulled in $70.9 million, the highest domestic gross for a movie released in March, and third best for an R-rated film. Since sword-and-sandal epics tend to do much bigger business abroad (Gladiator 59% of its theatrical take, Troy 73%), the upside for 300 is enormous.

That's not bad for a picture made on a frugal $65 million budget and shot on a bare Montreal soundstage, with the backgrounds digitally green-screened in later, in the manner of Robert Rodriguez's version of the Miller Sin City. It's also not bad for a movie that's not good. For all its battle-scene gore, 300 is at heart a talky civics lesson. It's dead-serious, stentorian and, when it's not hacking muscular fighters to bits, pretty stodgy.

But, hey, the kids love 300, and we're bound to figure out why. Here are seven guesses as to why the movie was such a Spartanian smash.



1. The marketing.

While still in production, a movie about the heroic defense against a horde off seemingly indestructible invaders is adopted by the fanboys of the Internet. The film becomes a sensation even before it's released and... sorry, that was Snakes on a Plane.

But 300 did benefit from its exposure at last year's Comic-Con convention, and from Warner Bros.' posting of 300 stills from the movie on MySpace. The $70 million opening means that we will see another spate of stories on the power of the Web to launch movies — stories we've been reading since 1999, when The Blair Witch Project became a surprise smash, but whose predictions of seismic changes in movie marketing have been realized only fitfully.

Also: I didn't want to waste one of my seven reasons on this, but the weather was a factor in the picture's success. Last weekend, for a spring change, it was nice out. People wanted to go to the movies, and 300 was waiting for them.




2. The history.

By which I mean movie history.

According to legend, Leonidas, King of the Spartans and the hero of Thermopylae, was a direct descendant of Heracles. For sure, 300 is a direct descendant of Le Fatiche di Ercole, the 1958 Italian sword-and-sandal epic directed by Pietro Francisci and starring California muscleman Steve Reeves. Entrepreneur Joe Levine bought the U.S. distribution rights to the movie (for $120,000), shortened the title to Hercules and booked it in more than 600 theaters — possibly the largest booking of that time, when films typically opened in a few big-city theaters, then slowly spread out to neighborhood bijous. Hercules was a hit, and Levine — who famously said, "You can fool all the people all the time, if the... [advertising] budget is big enough" — had established the viability of the wide movie release.

Hercules spawned perhaps a hundred peplum epics, so called for the short skirts the guys wore. All were inspired by Greek and Roman mythology; Reeves, a former Mr. America, Mr. World and Mr. Universe whose previous claim to fame had been a costarring role in Ed Wood's Jail Bait, went on to star in a Hercules sequel, then as Aeneas and Romulus. After him came other musclemen: Reg Park in Hercules Conquers Atlantis, Ed Fury in Ursus, Son of Hercules, Mark Forest in Mole Men vs. the Son of Hercules. Well-tended flesh was as important to these movies as to 300, as were the decorous women and extravagant battle scenes.

The peplum fad kept the Italian film industry going until it discovered its next and more lasting trend, the spaghetti Western. Directors and stars simply moved from one genre to the next. Before helming A Fistful of Dollars, which kicked his and Clint Eastwood's career into overdrive, Sergio Leone had made his directing debut with The Colossus of Rhodes.

Inevitably, the Italians did their Thermopylae epic. It was called The 300 Spartans, starred Richard Egan as Leonidas and was told with more finesse than 300, though without quite the digital flair. It was no masterpiece either.




3. The comic book.

Planted firmly in the realm of cartoons / video games / comic books to which 90% of American movies aspire, the Miller graphic novel (with coloring by Lynn Varley) is a faithful, if jizzed-up, version of the 479 B.C. battle of Thermopylae. The action and much of the dialogue are taken from Herodotus' near-contemporary history.

As in the original, Leonidas (Phantom of the Opera's Gerald Butler) goes to the swinish holy men, the Ephors, for permission to wage a defense against the million-man army of the Persian monarch Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, from Lost). The oracle waffles, but Leonidas, saying he's just going out for a stroll with his private guards, leaves his wife Gorgo (The Brothers Grimm's Lena Headey) and leads his loyal band to their desperate and storied destiny. He might have triumphed, if the homunculus Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan, from British TV) had not betrayed the Greeks and told Xerxes their strategy.

All the famous lines are here: "Go tell the Spartans"; "Come and get us"; and the Spartan soldier's deflection of the Persian threat, "Our arrows will blot out the sun" — he says, "Then we will fight in the shade." Herodotus: damned fine screenwriter.

Miller pictures Leonidas as a hero of Hestonian features (though Butler looks like a sturdier Soupy Sales). He gives a lot of cross-species personality to his villains. He draws the Ephors as pigmen with pigment. And Ephialtes is Miller's Gollum: misshapen in body and mind, eager to please, susceptible to bribes. His battles are grandly realized, with dark splashes of Utrillo. The whole thing is the smartest rendering of a klassics komic book, which the movie basically dupes, down to the last frame. It's a virtual Xerxes Xerox.




4. The political and religious metaphors.

All right, any movie, from Happy Feet to Hannibal Rising, can be a metaphor for Iraq. But we'll pass along the percolating argument that Leonidas is George W. Bush. In brief: Over the protests of the highest government (the Ephors or the U.N.), a commander-in-chief goes to war with an undersize army against a formidable Middle-Eastern power. All so he could say, as Leonidas does: "We rescued a world from mysticism and tyranny."

The authorities in Iran think the movie is about them, since their country is the descendant of ancient Persia. A cultural adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad charged the film with "plundering Iran's historic past and insulting this civilization." The newspaper Ayandeh-No ran the headline "Hollywood Declares War on Iranians, adding, that the movie "seeks to tell people that Iran, which is in the Axis of Evil now, has for long been the source of evil and modern Iranians' ancestors are the ugly murderous dumb savages you see in 300."

Mind you, the Spartans might also be the Iraqi insurgents, leaving their homes to repel a foreign invader. Or they could be seen as Greece's private mercenary army initiating their own mischief: a Blackwater USA of the Aegean. Or Stephen Colbert, analyzing the movie on his show, could be onto something: that the wolf at the beginning of the film is the liberal press, various monsters are Nancy Pelosi and Tim Russert, and the Persian messenger whom Leonidas kicks over the edge of a deep well is Scooter Libby.

More potent similarities can be found between 300 and the R-rated film with the all-time highest opening-weekend gross. Consider: It's the beyond-bloody saga of an ancient king who leads a high-minded rebellion against a corrupt hierarchy, who endures extraordinary physical abuse before dying nobly, and whose name has been praised throughout history. In other words, 300 is The Passion of the Christ.

BTW: In the original legend, Xerxes has Leonidas crucified.




5. The look.

The movie is handsomely dark, like that spate of '80s dystopian fantasy epics (Blade Runner, The Keep, Labyrinth). The sun really is blotted out; all the fights seem to take place at dusk. In fact, the whole movie looks awfully sooty. Maybe it's really a commentary on the Industrial Revolution.

When in doubt, any action film cranks down the action. Here, the bad guys swing their armaments in slo-mo, allowing the good guys to stab them in norm-mo. In one inspired sequence, the action stops as it traces the flight of an arrow, slicing it into separate panels on the screen — Zeno's Arrow Paradox, in a fanboy movie!

But the look is too often neutralized, made listless, by all the talk. There are many long dialogues, shot in Cyclopsian closeup. Trying to give the orations more heft, the actors shout them, often pausing after each sentence fragment — as Leonidas does in this iambic-pentameter invocation to his troops: "Eat hearty. For tonight. We dine, In hell."




6. The women.

A peplum epic demands a little female skin, and 300 serves up a few glimpses of erect nipples, a few tableaux of women (and the odd hermaphrodite) in perfunctory writhing.

The movie's major difference from the book is in its portrait of Leonidas' queen, Gorgo (who in Greek legend was also the daughter of the king's half-brother). Miller, mesmerized by battle and honor, had little interest in the queen; she appears in just a few panels. The movie, true to the actual Spartan tradition of emancipated womanhood, promotes Gorgo (played with a kind of stalwart sensuality by Headey) to a co-starring role, allowing her to take fatal revenge on a wicked politician who had sodomized her. In the book, Leonidas thought Sparta was always an ideal worth dying for. In the movie, Gorgo's beauty, strength and courage give him something to live for.

Still, the movie Gorgo's parting words to her husband aren't exactly "Get home safe, honey." Instead, a severe Spartette to the end, she says: "Come back with your shield. Or on it."




7. The men.

A Spartan boy is bred to militarism. He's taken from his mother and, as the movie says, is "thrown into a world of unspeakable cruelty" (or, as the English call it, boarding school). Spartans are the tough guys, the bully boys, the warrior class, fighting and dying for other Greeks who may lack their mettle. Leonidas chides the Athenians as "those philosophers and boy-lovers."

Yet the movie is totally gay, a romp in Homer eroticism. Male body worship abounds; the actors, who seem pumped up on Hellenic growth hormones, hardly need shields or swords. Their pecks are their breastplate; their tumorous abs are their body armor. (Thee closing credits list two "personal trainers to Mr. Butler, so I guess the muscles aren't all CGI.) They boast and tease each other about their physiques, which to me sounds like flirting. At times these ancient bodybuilders look like their own statuary, heroic and sometimes headless.

Even the Spartans' nobility is homoneurotic. They rhapsodize about "a beautiful death," and figure in military hagiography somewhere between Wagner's Siegfried and the Third Reich's S.S. (I mean that in a nice way.) "It's an honor to die at you side,"one officer says toward the end to Leonidas, who replies, "It's an honor to have lived at yours." If this movie dialogue were between a man and a woman, I guarantee the audience would spill their popcorn in giggle fits. But the crowd I saw 300 with suffered all this strained seriousness in respectful silence.

In his last battle, Leonidas gets an enemy arrow in each tit, and soon he's Xerxes' pin cushion. The image may remind you of Saint Sebastian in a medieval painting, or Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. To me it recalled some of the more extreme photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.

I know nothing of the sexual orientation of Snyder or Miller. And I'm not criticizing, only describing, 300's iconography. But I'm surprised by the movie's broad appeal to the movie block of young American males, many of whom still use "gay" as the second-worst slur, and can still see homosexuality as something to laugh at or fear. Maybe the success of 300 will encourage other, better, directors to make dead-serious movies on ancient-history subjects. And maybe, then, we'll hear kids come out of the theater burbling, "I loved that movie, man! It was totally gay!"

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white_hat

also dont forget all the free publicity done by iranians, telling everybody not to see this movie

black_white

daghighan!
man harchi bishtar badisho mishnavam bishtar mikham beram bebinam. kheyli az iraniya khodeshoun raftan didan ke befahman jaryan chiye ke hame daran darbarash bad migan. albate az nazare filmsazi va special effect shenidam file khafaniye

Yummy

In Apocalipto, the maya's were pictured like wild animals, barbarians....they were some critics on their side, but it is still a movie, and it won't change the histor books! The same goes for this movie. It hurts our feelings, but still, WE were the great persian empire, no movie can change that

Prodigy

Americans have always tried to show the Native Americans as savages so they can justify what they did to them and their homeland, Hollywood has always been a tool for psychological warfare and propaganda its not something new they did it with the Soviets the Vietnamese the Iraqis and etc, and now its our turn. Anyhow as you said it yourself its just a movie, a movie which is based on a comic book rather than trying to prove the historical facts and figures that happened so long ago, I think the online petitions not only did not help to boycott this movie but acted as an advertising medium to promote the movie, and we have ourselves to thank for that great idea


PS: I just rememberd I still owe you some goje sabz

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Yummy

VAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG YOU DO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


eyd shod bazo man hanooz goje sabzamo nagereftam!!! pas key dige????????????????/ daghesh be delam moooooooond noujan emsal nafresti nefrinet mikonam

Prodigy

Bashe chashm emsal sayamo mikonam vasat befrestam nefrin nakon felan be andaze kafi moshkel darim

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Yummy

be an rabti nadare dige! shode ba olagham, befrest