300 Spartans

Two days ago i watched the much anticipated movie that many people in my environment talked about: 300. While i got a warning before watching it that the persians were portrayed entirely as barbarians, no one told me about how incredibly bad and boring the film was going to be. In general i tend to be quite generous with movies, but this one was really bad. The only other example of when a movie actually made me angry was "catwoman" that was just plainly an insult to any intelligent human being, but this one really topped it. The whole film was an extended war-scene, which, i must admit, had very detailed and well-made special effects. However, these special effects, such as a decapitated head that spins through the air, enabling the viewer to have an intimate glimpse of the spinal cord and lots of blood, usually tend to get a vast range of responses. As i am not a person to get excited when viewing such images, they did little to raise my opinion of the movie.
What was wrong with 300? Well, to begin with, i felt that both the spartans and the persians were barbarians, but the movie was supposed to portray the former as the good and the latter as the evil and inhuman. At the beginning we get a glimpse into the life of the greek city-state and how they kill babies that are not born as ideal soldiers. Is that not barbaric? Slightly later the persian messenger gets killed for delivering a message the spartan king did not like. Is that not barbaric? Then there were all these weird creatures in the movie that at least made it obvious that the directors were not taking facts too seriously. When seeing them i was slightly relieved, because i understood that it was not supposed to be factual.
The persians in the film looked like they were from africa, not persia, but i guess with the large empire that they covered one could find supporting arguments for their totally non-persian features. I must admit i found the portrayal of king xerxes extremely amusing: he looked like a transvestite that was taller than yao ming. His face had several piercings, also in really random places, his eyebrows were neatly plucked, and he had as much make-up on his face as usually persian women above 40 do. So at least that last element could be argued as representative, though for the wrong gender. Oh, i almost forgot, he just had to have that typical monster-like voice that hollywood loves to use, for people to understand that he was evil.
The entire film was essentially a big battle scene, with a few shots that only supported that craze about warfare. I find movies that glorify these kind of things abhorring. Throughout watching this i was thinking about how the greeks are representative of the western world, while the persians for the eastern, especially the muslim middle-east. Both sides in my eyes were barbaric, and yet the makers wanted to convince the viewer that the western side was the good one. It just seemed so representative of the present-day world we live in with huntingon's "clash of civilisations" theory becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is not my purpose to defend iran, or belittle the moral decline that has been taking place there, but it does bother me to see how media (including film) forge information to make it more dramatic. A perfect example is the alleged statement of the iranian president, ahmadinezhad, calling for israel to be wiped off the map. This never took place! I myself believed it for quite a while until i got a chance to read the actual persian text of that statement. The word "map" does not appear! He was referring to the violent regime, not the country as a whole. I think that this example greatly demonstrates the influence media has on us, for the whole world is taking the actual occurance of that declaration for granted, even though it is not true!
This movie about the spartans ought to be viewed with the same skepticism as the alleged statement of ahmadinezhad should have been. Otherwise we become blind to mind games that coerce wrong opinions upon us.
enough from me, peace out