01. Oh god, this movie is a visual orgasm. Can I say how much I appreciate it when movies actually have an aesthetic vision? Best Art Direction, Academy Awards 2008. I just love the near-sublime stylization of everything because it looks so freaking cool. Is that shallow? Maybe, but I wish more movies would spend more time on this sort of thing since it is a visual medium.
02. I’m really glad they included my absolute favourite Spartan adage in: come back with your shield or on it. Spartan women kill me.
03. The blood. OH THE BLOOD. Anyone else feel like the CGI artists watched Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country over and over prior to starting work on the blood? Because the blood in this movie floats around in little globules as if everyone is trapped in a gigantic anti-gravity chamber. I was also rather disappointed by the lack of aortal gushing during each decapitation.
04. I expected it to be more violent than it actually was. Maybe I’m becoming increasingly unfazed by this sort of thing, but the only thing I found vaguely squirmish was when little!Leonidas beat that guy’s face to a bloody pulp while he was in training as a child. Otherwise it was a hell of a lot less gory than, say, Braveheart.
05. There were some funny lines scattered throughout the movie (“I did bring more soldiers than you”), but for the most part I thought the dialogue was rather lame and trying way too hard to be Seriously Epic™. I gather they were trying to sound poetic and deep, as if the words uttered on the battlefield would be spoken by later generations of Spartans as they trained to become skilled warriors, but they just ended up sounding as if a random fourteen year-old with a penchant for the melodramatic accidentally got hired as the script doctor.
05. I’m surprised that Saskatchewan doesn’t play host to more movie productions, considering that nearly every quasi-historical blockbuster film starting with Gladiator seems to make gratuitous use of women walking in anguish through wheat fields.
06. You know in Old School when Will Ferrell accidentally hits himself in the neck with the industrial grade tranquilizer dart and the sound mixer mixes his voice down so that it sounds lower, more slow, and unnatural as the drugs begin to course through his system? That’s what Xerxes sounded like. I was pretty convinced he had a laryngectomy or something. Turns out they completely wasted the hottie from Love, Actually, Karl, in the role. Was there a reason he was approximately eight feet tall or did they really need to hit us over the head with the idea that he was larger than life, as if his completely ostentatious modes of transportation did not convey this?
07. I thought the rock music was really effective in the scenes where they actually used it and that they actually should have used it more than they did.
08. I love it when characters come up with hypothetical situations about death because then you know someone is going to die. When the Captain pointed out to Leonidas that even if his son dies, he’s got a bunch of other sons to replace him, you knew the son was going to hack it right in front of his father’s eyes. GUESS WHAT HAPPENED. Oh man, so very silly. [The fact that the son died is only interesting because it didn't happen when the rest of them died right at the end.]
09. I kind of loved the “we’ll fight in the shade” guy. He had some of the coolest moves on the battlefield and I loved his foreplay disguised as witty man-banter with the Captain’s son. I might be reading too much into their relationship, however.
10. So, the complaints about how this is pro-war propaganda? If they had excised the Queen’s speech at the end and actually made that type of theme a lot more subtle, I can see how one might see it as propaganda. But it was just so out there and in your face that I can’t see how anyone can actually take this serious as propaganda. I nearly started laughing when she was appealing to the politicians. Oh man. It’s bad writing, not propaganda.
11. Loved the Queen, actually. Loved the Spartan women in general, especially when the Spartan men would defend them to other people with a “Bitch, plz, are women are roughly ten-thousand times better warriors than your best men, so STFU.” When she killed the guy at the end, I wanted to clap.
12. I’d complain about the gratuitous number of incredibly stiff nipples in this film, but since they happen to be on both men and women one can hardly complain about bias.
13. Don’t really get the idea of running around in a loincloth and bare feet when there is snow on the ground, but okay.
14. The oracle was pretty neat. I imagine they filmed her writhing under water and then digitized her movements like they did for the Dementors in Prisoner of Azkaban. Yes, I was thinking of wraith-like figures during that entire scene, hahaha.
15. The weaponry was pretty cool; the Persians got some pretty neat arrowheads.
16. This movie has a huge gaping hole in it somewhere that, despite my adoration of the aesthetic treatment, made the movie on the whole not that enjoyable for me. For one, it felt rather long, which is sad because it’s less than two hours. For another, it wasn’t as intense as I thought it was going to be. I don’t know, I find that this is one of these films where all the best parts are in the trailer. I kind of wish it had been tightly edited into a short film or something. I’m actually rather disappointed with it because it could have been so much more, but there’s not enough depth in the story to layer a visual smörgåsbord on top of and have it be enjoyable.
17. Forgot to mention it, but I adored the closing credits. Even though I loved the aesthetic the film had, I wonder how much more interesting it could have been as a film itself if it had been done in the style of the closing credits.