Find Religion

Here’s the post I’ve been promising you: My thoughts on the movie 300. If you haven’t yet seen this film, I recommend doing so, because at the core, it’s a movie that everyone should see. It does a lot of things right. However, in no way would I call 300 an accurate movie, and I’m not even a historian. Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD if you have yet to see the movie!

The movie tells the tale of the small Greek state of Sparta fighting the Persian empire. The draw of this movie for me was the amazing fight scenes that were supposed to be shown. In real life, the Spartans were known for their amazing fighting skills–mainly their advanced fighting in formations. Think of it like a marching band. Everyone knew where to go to make the formation strongest in any situation. The first fight scene in the movie showed this, and was breath-taking. After that, the movie resorted to stop-action filming showing the Spartans fighting hand-to-hand combat. Seriously, that doesn’t make sense. Regardless of how they cut off the Persians in order to only fight a few at a time, when the same 10 or so men were always at the front lines, as shown in the movie, they’d get tired eventually. Really, this doesn’t make sense.

But what makes even less sense is the portrayal of the Persians and Xerxes. Historically speaking, Xerxes (also known as Khashyarsha) was a devout Zoroastrian. I’m not saying that he wasn’t a dictator or a tyrant–maybe he was–but he was not a God, nor did he portray himself to be. Xerxes was a devout worshiper of Ahura Mazda, and the Persians would have rebelled against him if he even compared himself to God.

The way that the Persians were represented in the movie, as monsters in many cases, was also ridiculous. In fact, at one point in the movie, I had to laugh, because a character looked like a giant crab-creature. Give me a break. In one interview, Frank Miller said,

Well, okay, then let’s finally talk about the enemy. For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.

Sounds kinda…derogatory to me. How about to you? My friend Bijhan, a Zoroastrian himself, had this to say about the film:

This is simply insane, implying that microphones and airplanes are beyond the mental capacity of someone who would believe in a different God than his. Also, for the record, the Persians were not Muslims nor Arabs. The Persians did NOT genitally mutilate their women, they did NOT saw peoples’ heads off. Many Persian theologians at the time were suggesting that God was indeed a woman, and the naval commander for the Persians during the war was, in fact, a woman! Artemisia I of Caria was the Queen of Helicarnassus, a Persian territory in Asia Minor, was one of the closest tactical advisers to Xerxes, and was highly regarded in Persia.

All in all, the movie was a let-down simply because it could have been SO MUCH BETTER. I’m not saying that they needed a perfectly accurate representation of what happened, but they could have done a better job to the advantage of the movie.

Xerxes, 300, Frank Miller, Persia, Zoroastrianism