"300" paints The Battle of Thermopylae with stunning imagery, stylized filmmaking, and a comic artist's brush. TwitchGuru's Travis Meacham infiltrated The Hot Gates to witness "300" in IMAX.

lol, I like that.

I won't quote the rest of the paragraph, cant wait to see this movie.

I didn't know that it was based on a comic book. Good that you cleared it up for me for even though I was going to see it I was all WTF when I saw the mutants and immortals in the trailers. Also the fact that there were 1400 troops there not 300. Now that that is cleared I should be able to enjoy this film more. Too bad I'll have to wait till the 22nd of March

One question though how did you manage to convince the wife to go along with you? Please reveal your secret. Mine says that she doesn't want to go for a movie where she knows that everyone dies. :?

Seen this on IMAX last night. Amazing movie.

If you have ever studied Greek myth then it is only loosely connected to any historical account of these events.

Even while not being historically accurate it does do an excellent job in honoring the magnitude of the battle and the sacrifice the Spartans made for the entirety of Greece at that time.

If it wasnt for the freed slaves of Sparta then the Persians would have marched freely across Europe and the world would have been a very different place. The Roman Empire was still in its infancy. If the Persians would have succeeded then the Modern world as we know it would never have come to be.

u mean Roman kingdom

Anyway the world would've been different for sure but who is to say whether for the better or worst

i have seen the trailer, and i thought it sucked
after reading this, it makes more sense

perhaps i'll watch it after all

His wife certainly sounds shallow. If she reads this I'm sure she will turn away from the screen, flip her hair, and say "whatever..."

8O Man that's personal!!! I think it is a little bit harsh to make a judgment based on that small sentence

Truly a wonderful break from all the horrible reviews I read of it. I despise movie critics these days, they expect a good movie to be perfect for every reason, and can't appreciate one that just takes a few really cool things and runs with them.

300 was amazing. The battles were glorious. The contrast and colors were quite stunning and impressively done, and the music during battles was such a fresh break from Enya and such during Gladiator.

Who cares if the story wasn't terribly exciting? Who cares if we knew the ending going into the movie? What does it matter if characters sometimes said silly things ("THIS! IS! SPARTAAA!" *kick*)? I give it 9/10 because it was just SO fun to watch.

And the combat. God, the combat. Gladiator sped it up slightly, 300 slowed it down heavily. This was a very very good thing. Every blow, every dodge and parry, the way two characters would fight alongside each other as a single unit... simply amazing to watch, and slow enough that you could appreciate every fluid motion.

Heavily recommended if you want to be wowed. Not heavily recommended if you're a stuck-up, out of touch movie critic who wants strong character development and a multitude of plot twists and overly romantic scenes.

It's a repeat of Pirates of the Caribbean. The critics hated it, the movie-goers loved it.

So true. Every once in a while everybody needs to see such a movie cheesy dialog and all just for the entertainment.

Actually, there were probably about 5,000 Greeks at Thermopylae, mostly Tegeans.

All in all I liked the movie, and given the paucity of support hollywood has for heroism (at least classical heroism), this fit the bill nicely. My only real criticism is that the I believe the actual event and people were inevitably more interesting (Heroditus notes that Xerxes men were actually very brave, although hopelessly outmatched).

If you want a more historically accurate account of the battle, have a look at: Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae by Steven Pressfield.

sounds like a killer movie ---- cant wait to see it. Reminds me of the old days when the critics hated star wars and raiders of the lost ark ---- i was like what the hell are they talking about ---- i guess somethings never change.

My wife is cut from a rare cloth. She loves action movies and videogames, so she was interested from the get go. She also loves mythology and ancient Greece, so that helped.

Netsez, I passed on your critique, and I can't say that an anonymous internet attack scarred her terribly, but she did not say, "whatever."

Yeah, I agree this was basically a perfect movie within the boundaries of what it was trying to do. It was like getting jabbed in the eyeball with 200ml of testosterone.

On the critics thing, I agree - most of them are just little dweebs who were into drama in high school. They can't just sit in a movie and turn off their brains and let a movie sweep over them.

Most of the reviews I've read from critics are literally ridiculous, just rampant prissy pomposity. I used to check reviews before I saw a movie - never again, those guys are simpering little twits almost to a one.

The reason critics didn't like this movie is because when you have been reviewing films for some time, you develop certain expectations. When you've seen so many films, and so many great films from the last 100 years you grow to know what a movie can very well be.

That's why this film is disappointing. It sincerely pisses me off when a film does so many things just right and then makes a complete blunder of something else.

This was my experience with 300, the visuals were impeccable, from cinematography to costume design, it all flowed brilliantly. The fights were choreographed quite well, and the variation of the speed in the battles provided great emphasis. This is where everything fell apart. The acting varied from adequate to barely passable, the dialogue was awful, save a few choice lines. It seemed to draw on lingual conventions spanning a millennium, where characters would slip into dialogue that was far too recent.

I don't like the choices Zack Snyder made in this movie. Nothing was left to the imagination or to speculation. Whether or not you were familiar with the graphic novel, it was painfully obvious how everything was going to turn out.

Leonidas would never stand down, would eventually be overtaken. Gorgo would end up shacking up with Theron. Astinos would die early.

Even still, I give it a

6.5/10