What have we learned?

[bettertomorrowamy]

I didn't see Orcs in 300, but I was assuming you meant Orc-like.  But yeah, hyperbole.

[RobtheBarbarian]

Yeah, that's nowhere near different enough for me. You're right, they weren't meant to be orcs, but they might as well have been orcs.

[bettertomorrowamy]

My whole point, whether they are orcs or not, was that they use hyperbole in Greek stories thus it made sense for 300 to have strange, inhuman creatures. 

[RobtheBarbarian]

Absolutely. I'm all for strange and inhuman, just a little more original.

[bettertomorrowamy]

Like Lord of the Rings was original.  It was just a Dungeons and Dragons geeks wet dream.  I slept through most of them.
I'm not saying 300 was best thing since sliced bread, but saying that an ancient Greek story was unrealistic is stupid.

[RobtheBarbarian]

Would it have been too much of a stretch for them to have made their subhuman monsters look less like every other subhuman monster? That's all I'm getting at. If they're going to tell the story through the lense of a myth, couldn't they be a little more imaginative about it?

[bettertomorrowamy]

I don't know I guess.  When I watched the movie, I didn't see the guy as being an Orc just as some kind of giant the persians captured.  Must have been cuz I fell asleep during lord of the rings.  I guess it's those fucking hobbits' fault.  Might as well have been Ewoks to me.

[RobtheBarbarian]

Whiney Ewoks with British accents. Like Ewoks, they're completely useless until specific parts in the movies when they're vital to the forces of Good.

[Indomitus]

I LEARNED...  that I they could have just pointed the camera at the comic book then moved it around a bit, and it would've looked essentially the same.

[Indomitus]

In light of that, I've also learned that actual, awesome history holds no interest to Hollywood.  And I've learned that this movie (and the comic it comes from) shares about as much with the actual history as Disney's "Sword in the Stone" shares with actual Arthurian history.

[bettertomorrowamy]

The Battle of Thermoplylae on which the movie is very very loosely based was not like  Homer's tales but a real military engagement that needed no embellishment or supernatural monsters.  A quote from Wikipedia:





In the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BC, an alliance of Greek city-states fought the invading Persian Empire at the pass of Thermopylae in central Greece. Vastly outnumbered, the Greeks held back the Persians for three days in one of history's most famous last stands. A small force led by King Leonidas of Sparta blocked the only road through which the massive army of Xerxes I of Persia (Xerxes the Great) could pass. After three days of battle, a local resident named Ephialtes betrayed the Greeks by revealing a mountain path that led behind the Greek lines. Dismissing the rest of the army, King Leonidas stayed behind with 300 Spartans and 700 Thespian volunteers. The Persians succeeded in taking the pass but sustained heavy losses, extremely disproportionate to those of the Greeks. The fierce resistance of the Spartan-led army offered Athens the invaluable time to prepare for a decisive naval battle that would come to determine the outcome of the war. The subsequent Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis left much of the Persian Empire's navy destroyed and Xerxes was forced to retreat back to Asia, leaving his army in Greece under Mardonius, who was to meet the Greeks in battle one last time. The Spartans assembled at full strength and led a pan-Greek army that defeated the Persians decisively at the Battle of Plataea, ending the Greco-Persian War and with it the expansion of the Persian Empire into Europe.



Anyway,  thats what I learned.

So, what did you want in the movie, Braveheart?  I'm sure when that narrator guy told the story to all the other Greeks he embellished.  He probably wasn't as good at telling a story as Homer, but I'm sure he made the story way more exciting than it was.  That's all I was saying.  I didn't mean that Homer wrote 300 for Christ's sake.

[RVR II]

I Learned that Torgo is 'In' with Mike to get his name mentioned in the RiffTrax

[bettertomorrowamy]

Yes it is a historical event, but there is no videotape of it happening.  The story has been passed from person to person.  It's a tale.  Just because wikipedia has text from a historian's theory of what the facts probably were, that doesn't mean that is exactly what happened.

Anyway, I'm not arguing that it isn't riffable.  I'm just saying that it is silly to complain that the story isn't realistic because nobody knows what really happened anyway.  Plus the movie is based on a graphic novel.  It's been stylized.

[Just Some Guy]

Yes it is a historical event, but there is no videotape of it happening.  The story has been passed from person to person.  It's a tale.  Just because wikipedia has text from a historian's theory of what the facts probably were, that doesn't mean that is exactly what happened.

There's a lot of primary sources that state that the Spartans sent a small force, that they delayed the Persians for quite a while, and that it remained behind and was crushed when the bulk of the rest of the greek forces withdrew.  The details may be just stories (for example, all those pithy lines that Herodotus has them say which were cribbed for the movie script), but the event happened.

[bettertomorrowamy]

What I'm saying is is that all history is made up to some degree, except for the bible of course.