300 – Battle Blueprint
Don’t get me wrong, I loved 300, I went to go see it back when it came out with my brother. I left the theater thinking, WOW theres a movie that people are going to be talking about tommorrow, and they did… at length, and how many times did we here THIS IS SPARTA! (which is why I shied away from the obvious comic path)…
I re-watched 300 again with my wife last week, (we’re watching war and romance movies this month) I realized that what I thought was an awesome ending scene for the badass of the movie, King Leonidas, actually ended up being pretty crappy in whole. The spartan army could’ve held much longer if the king hadn’t decided to go all AWESOME on them, seriously, its like they all forgot their training as soon as the enemy got behind them. The Phalanx that they used earlier in the movie is designed to protect the soldiers 360 degrees… But the good old king decided to screw tactics, I’s rather give Xerxes a new peircing… And to top it all off, he missed… yeah he nicked him and Xerxes bled, but ? he walked away.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:50 am
Actually, I was wondering about that awhile back, but at the first encounter with Xerxes, this conversation occurred:
Xerxes:”There will be no glory in your sacrifice. I will erase even the memory of Sparta from the histories. The world will never know you existed at all.”
King Leonidas:”The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and before this battle was over, that even a god king can bleed.”
The nick was to prove that Xerxes wasn’t invincible, though I do agree the rest of the army was completely ineffective.
November 11th, 2008 at 1:54 am
Also, don’t forget that the storyteller/narrator left before all this happened. He just knew Leonidas and the remaining warriors were killed. One would wonder he didn’t glorify it a bit more, but I guess the point was to get the soldiers riled up to fight and being able to harm Xerxes gave them a major morale boost. He couldn’t have said Leonidas killed Xerxes, since Xerxes was still alive.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:03 am
I know this is kinda old , but i just found it… The comic is brilliant , but the movie couldn’t have a different ending in any way, as mentioned above. I mean the Greeks were defeated in the real battle , not in this way of course , but they just made the movie’s ending this way so it would look “awesome” on purpose.