Oddly homoerotic and moronically-bombastic tale of masculinity & mayhem told in a highly-stylized manner - the style being far more important than the content. As a race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth it serves to underline White culture’s need of wars to undergird its economies and keep its populations under fascistic control by presenting other ethnicities in purely stereotypical terms: As existential threats to be shielded against.
Freedom of thought, action and speech are inherently-laden with the responsibility of wielding these for good, while propaganda like this enables Whites to evade the responsibility of being civilized, in favor of self-indulgence and self-pity that the losing of the War on Terror creates. The post-traumatic stress disorder of Whites still pointlessly-grieving over 9/11 induces them to ahistorically posit Whites as democrats and everyone else as non-democratic threats to inherently-civilized White values.
This War-on-Terror analogue (Persians standing-in for militant Muslims) tacitly admits wars against ideas are unwinnable, yet we are presented with a heroically-doomed struggle wherein Whites indulge their romantic fantasies of racial superiority and sexual normalcy. (This was also true of the previous American film of the same battle, albeit a Cold War analogue.)
Inevitably, given the movie’s provenance, the darker-skinned characters are uncivilized while the lighter Greeks - strangely rendered as a single country rather than a collection of warring city states - are the fons et origo of modern Western culture despite their warlike ways - effectively traducing the Achaemenid Empire by portraying the hundred nations of the Persians as uncivilized monsters. Like Gladiator claiming that ancient Rome was the light
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As with Caucasian representations of The Christ, this movie is part of concerted effort on the part of Whites to Nordify Ancient Greece - as if it literally were located in Northern Europe - so that actual Greek actors do not have to be employed to play actual Greeks. All the while, the Caucasian Persians are portrayed by Black actors, as part of an undifferentiated mass of genetically-inferior humanity - monsters, troglodytes, degenerates & demons for the purposes of entertainment; rendering this movie a textbook example of the psychological despair inherent in hate speech as well as of the White inferiority complex. Even though this is partly-inevitable, given that the story is derived solely from the fact that most sources from the period are of Greek origin, it is shoddy research not to include other sources.
What this film fails to address is the inherent injustice of claiming to be more concerned for justice than others – without evidence. And thus to be the sole purveyors of that justice and to have no reason to listen to others’ pleas for objective justice. Moreover, Sparta is a culture-less culture by this telling, since it is not clear what is being defended and why it should be necessary to brutalize Spartan children to harden them to combat.
One senses, throughout, the immature needs of a teenage Western boy who wants to become a man by cheating and posing in battle dress to impress the girls he always feels unworthy of. The Spartans, of course, are more manly here (ie, more homophobic) because they do not canoodle with young boys - like the Athenians do. Ahistorical machismo that, like all machismo, is little more than the worship of Death - not the worship of justice, reason or women.
A fuller analysis of the necessarily-difficult compromise between living in peace and planning for war would have made for a far more compelling drama. Moreover, the would-be poetry of the dialog requires the kind of screenwriter that this film sorely lacks. Still, the cast is first-rate and, to that extent, they paper over the wide cracks in the dramaturgy. Unlike First Blood, say, we really do not care why the carnage takes place - only that it does.
The well-known homosexuality of Greek culture is never mentioned, in the same way that mainstream Ancient Greek studies have historically-omitted references to the widespread practice of homosexuality; that is, until K J Dover’s 1978 book Greek Homosexuality. This film presents Spartans as not at all like pederasty of the Athenians or the effeminate and genetically-inferior Persians (who can only win by dint of sheer number, not by any inherent bravery or skill) in order to appear to be faithful to the Spartans’ martial code. Unusually for a film from a sexist culture, it emphasizes the key role played by women in supporting this male code of heroic honor - while projecting and displacing White misogyny onto Persians. All this to idealize modern-day Caucasian codes of mindless violence, White supremacy and homophobia.
By evading central issues, (including the contradiction of the democratic Greeks being slave-owners & their predilection for murdering the deformed at birth) this movie compromises what could have been a useful lesson and analogue from history by being complicated by 21st-century Western sexual standards and the desire to make what happened fit the current paradigm of White supremacy. It resolutely fails the test that if you ignore historical facts, you then need to replace them with something more interesting. Here, however, the glory that was once Greece is exploited to reinforce negative-but-core Western values through propaganda rather than constructively-challenging them in interesting and dramatically-arresting ways. Herein lies a useful example of the cultural poverty that is White culture; taking from dead cultures only that which makes Whites look superior; evading everything that does not.
