300 is a American
action film
adaptation of the graphic novel of
the same name by Frank Miller, and is a fictionalized
retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae
. The film was directed by
Zack Snyder, while Miller served as
executive producer and consultant. The
film was shot mostly with a
super-imposition chroma key technique, to help replicate the
imagery of the original comic book.
Spartan
King Leonidas (Gerard
Butler) and 300 Spartans fight to the last man against Persian "God-King" Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) and his army of more than
one million soldiers. As the battle rages, Spartan
Queen Gorgo (
Lena
Headey) attempts to rally support in Sparta for her husband.
The story is framed by a
voice-over
narrative by the Spartan soldier
Dilios (
David
Wenham). Through this narrative technique, various fantastical
creatures are introduced, placing
300 within the genre of
historical fantasy.
300 was released in both conventional and
IMAX theaters in the United States on March 9, 2007,
and on
DVD,
Blu-ray, and
HD DVD on July 31, 2007. The film's opening
was the 24th largest in
box office
history, although critics were divided over its look and style.
Some acclaimed it as an original achievement, while others
criticized it for favoring visuals over
characterization and its controversial
depiction of the ancient Persians.
Plot
Through
Dilios' narration, the life of young Leonidas is depicted, chronicling his journey
from a boy to a man through the Spartan doctrine of
Agoge. The climax of this is when the
young Leonidas kills a giant wolf using an improvised spear, after
which he returns to Sparta and is crowned king. Years later,
Persian messengers arrive at the gates of Sparta demanding its
submission to King
Xerxes.
Offended by their threats and behavior, Leonidas and his guards
kick the messengers down a well. Knowing that these actions will
precipitate a Persian attack, Leonidas visits the
Ephors, ancient,
leprosy-ridden
priests whose blessing he needs to convince the Spartan council to
authorize going to war.
He proposes a strategy to repel the
numerically superior Persians by using the terrain of Thermopylae
(the Hot Gates); his plan involves funneling the
Persians into a narrow pass between the rocks and the sea.
The Ephors consult the Oracle
Pythia, who
decrees that Sparta must not go to war. After Leonidas departs a
messenger from Xerxes appears, rewarding the Ephors for their
covert support and revealing that they have been corrupted by
Xerxes.
Denied by the Ephors, Leonidas follows his plan anyway, deciding to
set out with only 300 soldiers. He does not require the council's
permission as he calls the 300 his personal guard. Taking such a
small force, however, turns what had been a bold strategy into a
certain suicide mission. Leonidas hopes that the sacrifice of
himself and his men will spur the council to defy the Ephors and
all of Greece to unite against the threat to freedom and democracy
(represented by Greece) posed by slavery and tyranny (represented
by Persia).
Along the way to Thermopylae, the Spartans are joined by
Arcadians and various other
Greeks. Along the path, the band encounters a sacked
& burning town, apparently caused by Persian Immortals. Only a
young child is left to live. They construct a wall at Thermopylae
to contain the approaching Persian advance. Meanwhile, Leonidas
encounters
Ephialtes of
Trachis, a hunchbacked Spartan whose parents fled Sparta to
spare him certain
infanticide. Ephialtes asks to redeem
his father's name by joining Leonidas, warning him of a secret path
the Persians could use to outflank and surround them. Leonidas is
sympathetic to the eager warrior but rejects him, as Ephialtes
cannot properly hold a shield, which would compromise the Spartans'
phalanx formation.
Prior to the battle, the Persians demand that the Spartans lay down
their weapons. Leonidas refuses, and with their tightly-knit
phalanx formation the Spartans use the narrow terrain to repeatedly
rebuff the advancing Persian army. Xerxes personally approaches
Leonidas to persuade him to surrender, offering Leonidas wealth and
power in exchange for his loyalty. Leonidas declines, promising
instead to make the "
God-King" bleed.
Outraged, Xerxes sends in his elite guard, the
Immortals, whom the Spartans dispatch. As
the Spartans continue to defeat Xerxes' forces, Ephialtes defects
to the Persian king and reveals the location of the secret path.
When they realize Ephialtes' treachery, the Arcadians retreat.
Leonidas orders a reluctant Dilios to return to Sparta to tell the
Council of their sacrifice.
In Sparta,
Gorgo, Queen of
Sparta reluctantly submits sexually to the influential Theron
in exchange for help in persuading the Spartan council to send
reinforcements to Leonidas. Following her address to the Council,
Theron publicly betrays the Queen, prompting the councilmen to cry
out in outrage and Gorgo to kill him out of rage, spilling open a
bag of Persian coins from his robe. The exposure of Theron's
treachery, along with their Queen's plea, prompts the Council to
unite against Persia. Meanwhile, at Thermopylae, the Persians use
the goat path to surround the Spartans. Xerxes'
general demands their surrender, again
offering Leonidas titles and prestige. Leonidas seemingly bows in
submission, allowing one of his men to leap over him and kill the
general instead. A furious Xerxes orders his troops to attack. As
Persian archers shoot at the remaining Spartans, Leonidas rises and
hurls his spear at Xerxes, cutting the King on the cheek, thus
making good on his promise to make "the God-King bleed." Visibly
disturbed by this reminder of his own mortality, Xerxes watches as
all of the Spartans are slaughtered by a massive barrage of
arrows.
Concluding his tale before an audience of attentive Spartans,
Dilios declares that the Persian army, depleted by desertions out
of fear and the heavy casualties they suffered at the hands of a
mere 300 Spartans, now faces 10,000 Spartans commanding 30,000
Greeks. Although still outnumbered, Dilios declares that the Greeks
shall have victory. Praising the sacrifice of King Leonidas of
Sparta, Dilios leads the brave Greeks in a charge against the
Persian army, beginning the
Battle of
Plataea.
Cast
Production
Above: the film version of a
panel from the graphic novel (
below).
Above: A scene during filming.
Below: The finished scene.
Producer
Gianni Nunnari was not the only person planning a film about the
Battle of
Thermopylae; director Michael Mann already planned a
film of the battle based on the book Gates of Fire. Nunnari discovered
Frank Miller's
graphic novel
300, which impressed him enough to acquire the film
rights.
300 was jointly produced by Nunnari and Mark
Canton, and Michael B. Gordon wrote the script. Director
Zack Snyder was hired in June 2004 as he had
attempted to make a film based on Miller's novel before making his
debut with the remake of
Dawn of the Dead. Snyder
then had screenwriter Kurt Johnstad rewrite Gordon's script for
production and Frank Miller was retained as consultant and
executive producer.
The film is a
shot-for-shot
adaptation of the
comic book, similar
to the film adaptation of
Sin
City. Snyder photocopied panels from the comic book, from
which he planned the preceding and succeeding shots. "It was a fun
process for me... to have a frame as a goal to get to," he said.
Like the comic book, the adaptation also used the character Dilios
as a narrator. Snyder used this narrative technique to show the
audience that the surreal "Frank Miller world" of
300 was
told from a subjective perspective. By utilizing Dilios' gift of
storytelling, he is able to introduce fantasy elements into the
film, explaining that "Dilios is a guy who knows how not to wreck a
good story with truth." Snyder also added the
sub-plot in which Queen Gorgo attempts to rally
support for her husband.
Two months of
pre-production were
required to create hundreds of shields, spears and swords, some of
which were recycled from
Troy
and
Alexander. An
animatronic wolf and thirteen animatronic
horses were also created. The actors trained alongside the
stuntmen, and even Snyder joined in. Upwards of 600 costumes were
created for the film, as well as extensive prosthetics for various
characters and the corpses of Persian soldiers. Shaun Smith and
Mark
Rappaport worked hand in hand with Snyder in pre-production to
design the look of the individual characters, and to produce the
prosthetics, props, weapons and dummy bodies required for the
production.
300 entered active production on
October 17, 2005, in Montreal
, and was
shot over the course of sixty days in chronological order with a
budget of $60 million. Employing the
digital backlot technique, Snyder shot at
the now-defunct Icestorm Studios in Montreal using
bluescreens. Butler said that while he didn't
feel constrained by Snyder's direction, fidelity to the comic
imposed certain limitations on his performance. Wenham said there
were times when Snyder wanted to precisely capture iconic moments
from the comic book, and other times when he gave actors freedom
"to explore within the world and the confines that had been set."
Headey said of her experience with the bluescreens, "It's very odd,
and emotionally, there's nothing to connect to apart from another
actor." Only one scene, in which horses travel across the
countryside, was shot outdoors. The film was an intensely physical
production, and Butler pulled an arm tendon and developed a
foot drop.
Post-production was handled by
Montreal's Meteor Studios and Hybride Technologies filled in the
bluescreen footage with more than 1500
visual effects shots.
Visual effects supervisor Chris
Watts and
production designer
Jim Bissell created a process dubbed "The Crush," which allowed the
Meteor artists to manipulate the colors by increasing the contrast
of light and dark. Certain sequences were
desaturated and tinted to
establish different moods. Ghislain St-Pierre, who led the team of
artists, described the effect: "Everything looks realistic, but it
has a kind of a gritty illustrative feel." Various
computer programs, including
Maya,
RenderMan and
RealFlow, were used to create the "spraying blood."
The post-production lasted for a year and was handled by a total of
ten
special effects companies.
Soundtrack
In July 2005, composer
Tyler Bates had
begun work on the film, describing the score as having "beautiful
themes on the top and large choir," but "tempered with some extreme
heaviness." The composer had scored for a test scene that the
director wanted to show to Warner Bros. to illustrate the path of
the project. Bates said that the score had "a lot of weight and
intensity in the low end of the percussion" that Snyder found
agreeable to the film.
The score was recorded at Abbey Road
Studios
and features the vocals of Azam
Ali. A standard edition and a
special edition of the soundtrack containing
25 tracks was released on March 6, 2007, with the special edition
containing a 16-page booklet and three two-sided
trading cards.
The score has given rise to some controversy in the film composer
community, garnering criticism for its striking similarity to
several other recent soundtracks, including
James Horner and
Gabriel Yared's work for the film
Troy. The heaviest borrowings are said to
be from
Elliot Goldenthal's 1999
score for
Titus. "Remember Us," from
300,
is identical in parts to the "
Finale" from
Titus, and
"Returns a King" is similar to the cue "
Victorius Titus." (See
Copyright issues.) On
August 3, 2007, Warner Bros. Pictures acknowledged in an official
statement:
... a number of the music cues for the score of
300 were, without our knowledge or participation, derived
from music composed by Academy Award winning composer Elliot
Goldenthal for the motion picture Titus. Warner Bros.
Pictures has great respect for Elliot, our longtime collaborator,
and is pleased to have amicably resolved this matter.
Promotion and release
The official
300 website was launched by Warner Bros. in
December 2005. The "conceptual art" and Zack Snyder's production
blog were the initial attractions of the site. Later, the website
added video journals describing production details, including
comic-to-screen shots and the creatures of
300. In January
2007, the studio launched a
MySpace page for
the film.
The Art Institutes
created a micro-site to promote the film.
At
Comic-Con International
in July 2006, the
300 panel aired a promotional teaser of
the film, which was positively received. Despite stringent
security, the trailer was subsequently leaked on the Internet.
Warner Bros. released the official trailer for
300 on
October 4, 2006, and later on it made its debut on Apple.com where
it received considerable exposure. The
background music used in the trailers was
"
Just Like You Imagined" by
Nine Inch Nails. A second
300 trailer, which was attached to
Apocalypto, was released in theaters on
December 8, 2006, and online the day before. On January 22, 2007,
an exclusive trailer for the film was broadcast during
prime time television. The trailers have been
credited with igniting interest in the film and contributing to its
box-office success.
In April 2006, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced its
intention to make a
PlayStation
Portable game,
300: March to
Glory, based on the film. Collision Studios worked with
Warner Bros. to capture the style of the film in the video game,
which was released simultaneously with the film in the United
States. The
National
Entertainment Collectibles Association produced a series of
action figures based on the film, as
well as replicas of weapons and armor.
Warner Bros. promoted
300 by
sponsoring the
Ultimate
Fighting Championship's
light
heavyweight champion
Chuck
Liddell, who made personal appearances and participated in
other promotional activities. The studio also joined with the
National Hockey League to
produce a 30-second TV spot promoting the film in tandem with the
Stanley Cup playoffs.
In August 2006, Warner Bros. announced
300's release date
as March 16, 2007, but in October the release was moved forward to
March 9, 2007.
300 was released on
DVD,
Blu-ray Disc, and
HD
DVD on July 31, 2007, in
Region 1
territories, in single-disc and two-disc editions.
300 was
released in single-disc and steelcase two-disc editions on DVD, BD
and HD DVD in
Region 2 territories
beginning August 2007. On July 21, 2009, Warner Bros. released a
new Blu-ray entitled
300: The Complete Experience to
coincide with the Blu-ray release of
Watchmen. This new Blu-ray is encased in a
40-page Digibook and includes all the extras from the original
release as well as some new ones. These features include a
Picture-in-Picture feature entitled
The Complete 300: A
Comprehensive Immersion, which enables the viewer to view the
film in three different perspectives. This release also includes a
Digital Copy.
On July 9, 2007, the American
cable
channel
TNT bought the
rights to broadcast the film from Warner Bros. TNT will be able to
start airing the movie in September 2009. Sources say that the
network paid between $17 million and just under $20 million for the
movie. TNT agreed to a three-year deal instead of the more typical
five-year deal.
Reception
Box office
300 was released in North America on March 9, 2007, in
both conventional and IMAX theaters. It grossed $28,106,731 on its
opening day and ended its North American
opening weekend with $70,885,301, breaking the record held by
Ice Age: The Meltdown
for the biggest opening weekend in the month of March.
300's opening weekend gross is the 24th highest in box
office history, coming slightly below
The Lost World: Jurassic
Park but higher than
Transformers. It was the third
biggest opening for an R-rated film ever, behind
The Matrix Reloaded ($91.8 million)
and
The Passion of the
Christ ($83.8 million). The film also set a record for
IMAX cinemas with a $3.6 million opening
weekend.
300 opened two days earlier, on
March 7, 2007, in Sparta
, and across Greece on March 8. Studio executives were surprised by the
showing, which was twice what they had expected. They credit the
movie's stylized violence, the strong female role of Queen Gorgo
which attracted a large number of women to the movie, and the
MySpace advertising blitz. Producer Mark Canton said, "MySpace had
an enormous impact but it has transcended the limitations of the
Internet or the graphic novel. Once you make a great movie, word
can spread very quickly."
Reviews
Since its world premiere at the
Berlin International Film
Festival on February 14, 2007, in front of 1,700 audience
members,
300 has received generally mixed reviews. While
it received a
standing ovation at
the public premiere, it was reportedly panned at a press screening
hours earlier, where many attendees left during the showing and
those who remained booed at the end. Critical reviews of
300 are divided.
Rotten
Tomatoes reports that 59 percent of North American and selected
international critics gave the film a positive review, based upon a
sample of 214, with an
average score
of 6.1 out of 10. Reviews from selected notable critics were 47
percent positive, giving the film an average score of 5.7 out of 10
based on a sample of 38. At
Metacritic,
which assigns a
normalized rating out
of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an
average score of 51 based on 35 reviews.
Variety's Todd McCarthy
describes the film as "visually arresting" although "bombastic"
while Kirk Honeycutt, writing in
The Hollywood Reporter, praises
the "beauty of its
topography, colors and
forms." Writing in the
Chicago Sun
Times,
Richard Roeper
acclaims
300 as "the
Citizen
Kane of cinematic graphic novels."
300 was also
warmly received by websites focusing on comics and
video games.
Comic Book Resources' Mark Cronan found
the film compelling, leaving him "with a feeling of power, from
having been witness to something grand."
IGN's
Todd Gilchrist acclaimed Zack Snyder as a cinematic visionary and
"a possible redeemer of modern moviemaking."
A number of critical reviews appeared in major
American newspapers.
A.O. Scott of
the
New York Times describes
300 as "about as violent as
Apocalypto and twice as stupid," while
criticizing its
color scheme and
suggesting that its plot includes
racist
undertones.
Kenneth Turan writes in
the
Los Angeles Times
that "unless you love violence as much as a Spartan,
Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing
teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated."
Roger Ebert, in his review, gave the film a
two-star rating, writing, "
300 has one-dimensional
caricatures who talk like
professional wrestlers plugging their
next feud."
Some
Greek newspapers
have been particularly critical, such as film critic Robby Eksiel,
who said that moviegoers would be dazzled by the "digital action"
but irritated by the "pompous interpretations and one-dimensional
characters."
Awards and nominations
The combat scenes were heavily
stylized, using slow motion camera work.
At the
MTV Movie Awards 2007,
300 was nominated for Best Movie, Best Performance for
Gerard Butler, Best Breakthrough Performance for Lena Headey, Best
Villain for Rodrigo Santoro, and Best Fight for Leonidas battling
"the Über Immortal." It eventually won the award for Best Fight.
300 won both the Best Dramatic Film and Best Action Film
honors in the 2006-2007 Golden Icon Awards presented by Travolta
Family Entertainment. In December 2007,
300 won
IGN's Movie of the Year 2007, along with Best Comic Book
Adaptation and King Leonidas as Favorite Character. At the 2008
Saturn Awards, the movie won the award
for
Best
Action/Adventure/Thriller Film.
In 2009,
National Review magazine
ranked "300" number 5 on its 25 Best Conservative Movies of the
Last 25 Years list.
Historical accuracy
300's director
Zack Snyder
stated in an MTV interview that "the events are 90 percent
accurate. It's just in the visualization that it's crazy.... I've
shown this movie to world-class historians who have said it's
amazing. They can't believe it's as accurate as it is." He
continues that the film is "an opera, not a documentary. That's
what I say when people say it's historically inaccurate." He was
also quoted in a
BBC News story as saying
that the film is, at its core "a
fantasy
film." He also describes the film's narrator, Dilios, as "a guy
who knows how not to wreck a good story with truth."
Paul Cartledge, Professor of Greek History at Cambridge
University
, advised the filmmakers on the pronunciation of Greek names, and
states that they "made good use" of his published work on
Sparta. He praises the film for its portrayal of "the
Spartans' heroic code," and of "the key role played by women in
backing up, indeed reinforcing, the male martial code of heroic
honour," while expressing reservations about its "'West' (goodies)
vs 'East' (baddies) polarization." Cartledge writes that he enjoyed
the film, although he found Leonidas' description of the Athenians
as "boy lovers" ironic, since the Spartans themselves incorporated
institutional pederasty into their
educational system.
Ephraim
Lytle, assistant professor of Hellenistic History at the University of
Toronto
, states that 300 selectively idealizes
Spartan society in a "problematic and disturbing" fashion, as well
as portraying the "hundred nations of the Persians" as monsters and
non-Spartan Greeks as weak. He suggests that the film's
moral universe would have seemed "as bizarre to
ancient Greeks as it does to modern
historians."
Victor Davis Hanson, National Review columnist and former
professor of Classical history at California
State University, Fresno
, who wrote the foreword to a 2007 re-issue of the
graphic novel, states that the film demonstrates a specific
affinity with the original material of Herodotus in that it captures the martial ethos of
ancient Sparta and represents Thermopylae as a "clash of
civilizations." He remarks that
Simonides,
Aeschylus and
Herodotus
viewed Thermopylae as a battle against "Eastern centralism and
collective serfdom," which opposed "the idea of the free citizen of
an autonomous
polis." He further states that
the film portrays the battle in a "surreal" manner, and that the
intent was to "entertain and shock first, and instruct
second."
Touraj Daryaee, now Baskerville Professor of
Iranian History and the Persiante World at the University
of California, Irvine
, criticizes the movie's use of classical sources,
writing:
Some passages from the Classical authors Aeschylus,
Diodorus, Herodotus and Plutarch are spilt over the movie to give it an
authentic flavor. Aeschylus becomes a major source when the battle
with the "monstrous human herd" of the Persians is narrated in the
film. Diodorus' statement about Greek valor to preserve their
liberty is inserted in the film, but his mention of Persian valor
is omitted. Herodotus' fanciful numbers are used to populate the
Persian army, and Plutarch's discussion of Greek women,
specifically Spartan women, is inserted wrongly in the dialogue
between the "misogynist" Persian ambassador
and the Spartan king. Classical sources are certainly used, but
exactly in all the wrong places, or quite naively. The Athenians
were fighting a sea battle during this.
Robert McHenry, former
editor-in-chief of
Encyclopedia
Britannica and author of
How to Know states that the
film "is an almost ineffably silly movie. Stills from the film
could easily be used to promote Buns of Steel, or AbMaster, or
ThighMaster. It’s about the romanticizing of the Spartan “ideal,” a
process that began even in ancient times, was promoted by the
Romans, and has survived over time while less and less resembling
the actual historical Sparta."
Controversy
Before the release of
300, Warner Brothers expressed
concerns about the political aspects of the film's theme. Snyder
relates that there was "a huge sensitivity about East versus West
with the studio."Media speculation about a possible parallel
between the Greco-Persian conflict and current events began in an
interview with Snyder that was conducted before the Berlin Film
Festival. The interviewer remarked that "everyone is sure to be
translating this [film] into contemporary politics." Snyder replied
that, while he was aware that people would read the film through
the lens of contemporary events, no parallels between the film and
the contemporary world were intended.
Outside the current political parallels, some critics have raised
more general questions about the film's ideological orientation.
The
New York Post s
Kyle Smith writes that the film would have
pleased "
Adolf's boys," and
Slate's Dana Stevens
compares the film to
The
Eternal Jew, "as a textbook example of how race-baiting
fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total
war." Roger Moore, a critic for the
Orlando Sentinel, relates
300
to
Susan Sontag's definition of
"
fascist art."
Alleanza Nazionale, an Italian
political party formed from the collapse of the
neo-fascist party MSI, has interpreted the values of
(and without allowance used imagery from) the work within candidate
propaganda posters titled: "Defend your values, your
civilization, your district".
However,
Newsday critic Gene
Seymour stated that such reactions are misguided, writing that "the
movie's just too darned silly to withstand any ideological
theorizing." Snyder himself dismissed ideological readings,
suggesting that reviewers who critique "a graphic novel movie about
a bunch of guys...stomping the snot out of each other" using words
like " 'neocon,' 'homophobic,' 'homoerotic' or 'racist' " are
"missing the point."
Since its opening,
300 also attracted controversy over its
portrayal of
Persians. Various
critics, historians, journalists, and officials of the Iranian
government including President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced the film.
As in the graphic novel, the Persians were depicted as a monstrous,
barbaric and demonic horde, and King
Xerxes was portrayed as
androgynous. Critics suggested that this was
meant to stand in stark contrast to the masculinity of the Spartan
army. Steven Rea argued that the film's Persians were a vehicle for
an anachronistic cross-section of Western stereotypes of Asian and
African cultures.
The
film's portrayal of ancient Persians
caused a particularly strong reaction in Iran
.
Azadeh Moaveni of Time reported that Tehran
was
"outraged" following the film's release. Moaveni identified
two factors which may have contributed to the intense reaction: its
release on the eve of
Nowruz, the Persian
New Year, and the common Iranian view of
the
Achaemenid Empire as "a
particularly noble page in their history." Various Iranian
officials condemned the film.
The Iranian Academy of the Arts
submitted a formal complaint against the movie to UNESCO
, labelling
it an attack on the historical identity of Iran.
The
Iranian mission to the U.N. protested the film in a press release, and Iranian embassies protested
its screening in France, Thailand
, Turkey
and Uzbekistan
.
Slovenian
philosopher and author Slavoj Žižek defended the movie, from
those who attacked it. He wrote that the story represents "a
poor, small country (Greece) invaded by the army of a much large[r]
state (Persia)," suggesting that the identification of the Spartans
with a modern superpower is flawed. Instead of seeing a
"fundamentalist" aspect in the Spartan identity, he stated that
"all modern egalitarian radicals, from
Rousseau to the
Jacobins...imagined the republican France as a
new Sparta."
In response to the criticisms, a Warner Bros. spokesman stated that
the film
300 "is a work of fiction inspired by the Frank
Miller graphic novel and loosely based on a historical event. The
studio developed this film purely as a fictional work with the sole
purpose of entertaining audiences; it is not meant to disparage an
ethnicity or culture or make any sort of
political statement."
The original
300 creator,
Frank Miller, has made the following
statement about the work in question: "
For some reason, nobody
seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth
century barbarism that they actually represent. These
people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they
genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any
cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into
a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture,
and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were
killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built."
He also explained the upcoming work "
Holy Terror, Batman!", a story wherein
Batman takes on
Al-Qaeda, as: "
It is, not to put too fine a
point on it, a piece of propaganda ... Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That's one of the
things they're there for."
Popular culture
300 has been
spoofed in various
media, spawning the "This is Sparta!"
internet meme, with parodies also appearing in
film and television. These include the
short United
300, which won the Movie Spoof Award at the
2007 MTV Movie Awards.
Skits based upon the film have appeared on
Saturday Night Live and
Robot Chicken, the latter of
which mimicked the visual style of
300 in a parody set
during the American Revolutionary War, titled "1776."
20th Century Fox released
Meet the Spartans, a spoof of
300.
Universal Pictures
is planning a similar parody, titled
National Lampoon's 301:
The Legend of Awesomest Maximus Wallace Leonidas.
300
was also parodied in an episode of
South
Park named "
D-Yikes!".
300, particularly its pithy
quotations, have been "adopted" by the student body of Michigan
State University
(whose sports teams are nicknamed the Spartans), with chants of "Spartans,
what is your profession?" becoming common at sporting events
starting after the movie's release, and Michigan State
basketball head coach Tom Izzo dressed
as Leonidas at one student event.
300 clips
are frequently shown at San Jose State University
Spartan athletic events. The famous pre-battle
scene regularly appears during SJSU's defensive third downs at
Spartan Stadium in San Jose
.
A single series of adult collectible action figures was created by
NECA following the release of the movie itself.
This included King Leonidas (with interchangeable heads), Gorgo,
Ephialtes, and an Immortal.
Sequel/prequel
In June 2008, producers Mark Canton, Gianni Nunnari and Bernie
Goldmann revealed that work had begun on a sequel/prequel to
300. Legendary Pictures has announced that Frank Miller is
writing the follow-up graphic novel, and Zack Snyder has declared
his interest in directing the adaptation, though he is waiting
until he sees the graphic novel before officially signing onto the
project. The new film's title is rumored to be
Sparta.
References
-
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2007/03/09/nb-maillet300.html
- Interview on Talk of the Nation (NPR) as
quoted in "NPR Interview with 300’s Frank Miller" The
Atlasphere (10 March 2007)
- On Holy Terror, as quoted in "Comic book hero takes on al-Qaeda" BBC News (15
February 2006)
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