History and Film: 300

The good news is, it was just about what I expected it to be. Awkward hard-boiled bon mots, gloriously over-the-top violence, computer-generated rhinoceri. The trailer did not lie.

Historically, this movie was nowhere close to accurate, but if you're going to a movie about ancient Sparta where the poster looks like it's advertising a heavy metal concert, what were you expecting? Among other things, the movie tries to cast the helot-owning Spartans as the champions of freedom, and has a plot point turn on the queen's alleged adultery, despite the fact that extramarital sex was not particularly scandalous in Sparta.

But the biggest problem, from a storytelling standpoint, was that the script allowed the foregone conclusion (the 300 Spartans die) to rob the story of any tension. Up until the moment they die, none of the Spartans surrender. None of them even consider surrendering. And none of them lose at hand-to-hand combat. Which means that most of the scenes are just a repeat of the Spartans facing a threat, dispatching it handily, and then reaffirming that no, they're still not surrendering. It's too bad, the last thing I expected was that the battle scenes would get boring.