7 Reasons Why 300 Is a Huge Hit

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Warner Bros.

Leonidas, played by Gerald Butler, fights his way through the first wave of Persian infantry in the film 300.

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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.

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