300

I watched 300 last week, and it was a pretty good film of the sort I wouldn’t normally bother to review here.

I am, however, somewhat struck by the massive point-missing that has gone on. Many have complained that the film appears to be crude political propaganda, although there is some dispute as to who is being supported and who attacked.

How many of these people actually stayed to the end? The film is indeed crude propaganda, as we see at the end the narrator of the whole movie, the David Wenham character, standing in front of an army doing the St Crispin bit, presumably at the battle of Platea.

All the things that have been attacked make perfect sense in that context. The characters banging on and on about freedom while their many slaves never appear in shot, the domestic political rivals of the narrator being represented as hideous subhumans, the improbable monstrous character of the Persians (and for that matter the wolf) — the film was not the battle of Thermopylae, it was a pep-talk for Platea.

I haven’t read the graphic novel, and indeed have only the slightest aquaintance with them (Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns is I think the only one I’ve ever bought), but that kind of perspective-choice is one of the things I think they can do well.

The imagination of another’s perspective seems to be something in very short supply. Witness as just one example the Telegraph editorial yesterday accusing Iran of “meddling in Iraq” — it takes an amazing lack of imagination not to see how ludicrous that sounds.