Oh dear...

Well, that's one Saturday evening down the pan. Shelling out money for 300 seems insulting, even with a student discount. The whole film's a bit of a mess, and though I've never read the Frank Miller comic book it seems as though the sum total of work by Miller and the writers of the film is entirely negative, serving only to massively diminish a strong dramatic core - Battle of Thermopylae after all having a fair degree of resonance in its own right. Instead what's left is a shoddy mess with some barely relevant pootling around with the politics of Sparta and countless speechifying on freedom and servitude that comes completely devoid of substance. Even worse, it's not even possible to say that the results are terribly impressive. Well, in an abstract technical sense I suppose they must be, but I was entirely unmoved by the CG action sequences which came across as boring and repetitive, while the digital backdrops just robbed the film of any sense of place, leaving it generic ancient past / fantasy. Poor job all round I'm afraid.