When the critics bash the film 300, I can't help noticing they also can't resist the temptation to bash anyone who actually enjoys it.
The ironically right-wing, Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post [1] tells us that the boys who liked this film would really fit in well with the Hitler Youth. It is when you find yourself being called a Nazi by the Its Unpatriotic To Criticize the War crowd that you know you're on someone's sore point.
I went delving through film reviews of 300 and found a lot of evaluations based upon what the film isn't and very few that attempted to grapple with what it actually is.
The first thing that strikes critics as 'appalling' is the film's apparent 'glorification of violence'. I'll return to this in a moment but first I have to observe that the largest problem critics have to face here is that they are, from the very beginning of the film, rendered totally uncertain as to the identity of the good guys.
Hollywood has drenched us with such utter shit these past few decades that film critics get really spooked whenever presented with cause to suspect the moral superiority of the 'heroes'. You know they'd be able to cope better if they weren't immediately informed that Spartans throw deformed babies into pits.
They could also cope better (or at least, manifest more palpable hypocrisy) if they could connect the heroes of this film to their own culture. After all, everybody knows that a violent and gore-filled film can be respectable only if it celebrates the patriotism of US troops in any theater of the Second World War.
So the hazy morality of a people who discard deformed babies and engage in child abuse somehow removes the imaginary 'white hats' from the heads of the Spartans. How very, very uncomfortable for film critics.
Without an obvious good guy/bad guy, critics began to flounder. Their next obstacle was the film's politics. Let's get this out of the way once and for all.
300 has no politics.
At least, none worth yapping about - critics looking for allegory should look elsewhere (like, hmm, Harry Potter? Go mad, you crazy kids! Lot's of politics there...)
In 300 there is no commentary on the Spartan attitude toward Athenian democracy, no soliloquys on totalitarianism. The Spartans only care about fighting well - politics and politicians are clearly the domain of old men, diseased inbreds, or the despicably corrupt.
Yet critics have made these political comparisons, sometimes comparing Spartans to US troops in Baghdad - other times the Persian Empire. It's somewhat amusing. It makes one feel like saying 'not everything is about you, guys. This film is about Spartans, because they were interesting and weird. Get over the 'not about you' part' and you'll begin to get this film.
Then one reviewer [2] seems to recognize that 300's bombast and intensity isn't representative of a failing on the directors part. "In a strange way, it may require these broad strokes to roughly convey the extremes of ancient history. The Spartans, martial in every facet of their lives, seemed strange even to other Greeks..."
The Spartans, one might say, were a weird bunch of cats. This film is unsettling, at times beautiful and provocative, at others simply unnerving and dark. It is nonetheless intensely enjoyable. If that is a problem for critics - if the high levels of violence are unaccompanied by the correct flag, cause or nationality, then that is a problem elsewhere.
I don't really believe we are encouraged to be violent in Western society, but we seem to be expected to be great hypocrites. You only need to read the New York Post occasionally to get a sense of that; I recommend it for its sheer entertainment value.
Just don't bother with their film reviews.