300 (M18): movie review

'300' is the ultimate NE movie for adults. In an age that's fashionable to portray teenage nancy-boy GIs whining for mommy while they're leaking their blood and guts all over the countryside, veteran graphic novellist, Frank Miller, reminds us once again what "dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori" means.

It's been a long while since there has been a movie featuring a bunch of soldierly-type fellows so eager to die for king and country. While protecting Greek civilization, the volunteer civilian army packs up and leaves at the first sign of trouble, but to the Spartans -- professional soldiers all -- "no retreat, no surrender" is the code they grimly lay their lives down for.

And for what? After all, Xerxes did promise to make Leonidas warlord of all Greece if only Leonidas would acknowledge Xerxes as Grand Poobah Overlord of Everything. Bit of an expedition Xerxes has mounted just to make the Greeks call him "uncle," I'd say.

But Leonidas would rather die a free man in a hail of "arrows that block out the sun" fighting the invaders of his country, than be a puppet king of a larger empire than he knows what to do with. And that's the price of freedom, fought over and paid for in blood and sacrifice.

What? And you thought freedom was a basic human right?

By NYconneXions