How is kindness a bad thing? I thought that was universally agreed to be a good message to have in a piece of media. I guess the excuse is they don’t want media to have messages at all but like, how would you even have a movie where the hero has no values that they stand for?
Did anyone walk away from that movie thinking “this is an unreliable narrator story and we shouldn’t take the fash-y elements at face value” or was it “damn the Spartans were bad ass”?
I thought it was weird that the “Heroes” threw deformed babies off a cliff and then when one of the deformed babies who survived, took the opportunity to betray the Spartans. What did Miller and Snyder mean by that?
The infanticide was historically accurate - although probably at a scale less than the movie implies. But it is in sources.
But yeah - the way that the film portrays the treatment of disabled people is especially gross. Pay attention to who is in the court of Xerxes - the acceptance of disabled bodies is presented as akin to the sort of “decadence” of these evil Persians. (If a necromancer brought Edward Said back to life to watch 300, it would probably kill him again.)
The movie is basically a Triumph of the Will for Spartans and torture for anyone who’s actually researched Greek history (Leonidus calling the Athenians “boy lovers” is teeth gritting, part of a Spartan education was getting fucked by older men…)
There’s a difference between historically accurate and implying that the historically accurate morals were correct. I liked the movie as popcorn entertainment, but some of the subtext didn’t sit right with me. So much so, I never felt the need to rewatch it or watch the squeal. Finding out that Snyder has been wanting to make a Atlas Shrugged movie doesn’t surprise me.