In fact, the film is framed as a saga related by the storyteller Dilios (David Wenham, neither ancient nor toothless). Snyder is entirely faithful to Miller’s intent, however, and he has cooked up an astonishing visual feast, spinning a tale that at times mimics the graphic novel frame-by-frame, the raucous content just what you’d expect to hear from some ancient, toothless sage telling hero tales around a campfire. It’s somewhat ironic that whereas Troy, retelling a story rooted in myth, sought to present a world devoid of the unusual, 300, while recounting a story drawn from fact, is as fanciful as any Homeric yarn (cue fat freak with sharpened tusks for arms and a bard with a goat’s head). If the battle at Thermopylae had occurred a millennium earlier, it would no doubt have formed the basis of a legend every bit as fantastic and entertaining as the works of Homer (much more lively than the pallid cinematic offering that was Troy, based on Homer’s The Iliad). For Miller’s intention was that 300 should be historically inaccurate - this was his bid to mythologize an actual event, lending to it the power and grace (and a healthy amount of exaggeration) normally associated with classical epic.
Their story is the stuff of legend, and that thought was paramount in Miller’s mind when consigning his vision to the page. Unlike the English football team, however, they offered a remarkable display of mettle - and indeed metal - against an army hundreds of times their size. 200,000 is hardly a fair contest, Leonidas and co. Still, much like a football match between England and Brazil, 300 vs. They also lift from his dialogue (“Then we’ll fight in the shade” is a line from the great historian, for example), although both happily depart from his source material when counting colossal elephants among the Persian forces. While modern scholars insist that the Persian horde, vast as it was, totalled no more than 200,000 men, Miller and Snyder prefer Herodotus’ estimate.
The Spartan king Leonidas, played here by Gerard Butler, did defend the ‘Hot Gates’ in Northern Greece with 300 hoplites, against an invading Persian army that Herodotus, the ‘father of history’, numbered at one million strong. Thermopylae was a real battle, the opening salvo of the Second Persian War no less. Trumpeted by its makers as “Gladiator meets Sin City”, the cinematic rendition of 300 is fiercely loyal to its bronze-and-crimson-coloured graphic progenitor and, as such, is as far removed from reality as the last batch of Celebrity Big Brother housemates. What those warriors achieved in life (and lots of death) still echoes through eternity.
An adaptation of Sin City creator Frank Miller’s graphic novel, 300 recounts the country’s finest hour: Sparta kicked plenty of ass over the ages, but it was at Thermopylae, in 480 BC, that she earned eternal renown. A better modern-day equivalent to ‘Spartan’ might be ‘belligerent nutcase’, and anyone in doubt need look no further than 300, which stands as an opulent, brutal and bloody declaration of that fact. But while the Spartans of ancient Greece were all those things and more, none of these locutions captures the essence of this unique people. The word ‘Spartan’ nestles in the English lexicon as a synonym for words like ‘austere’ and ‘disciplined’.