Growing up during the rise of violent video games like Mortal Kombat, in a post A Clockwork Orange era, with such movies getting critical acclaim and enjoying commercial success as Pulp Fiction and Silence of the Lambs there was much talk of the media desensitizing today’s youth to violent images. Watching 300, I realize this was not at all the case. We were not being desensitized. We were being prepared. Without those movies under our belts, without The Matrix readying our visual pallets and The Lord of the Rings teaching us how to discern frenzied melees, we would not have been ready. This is a violent, bloody movie, but you don’t notice it. The violence and the blood are the mere setting required to frame a moving painting of glory and sacrifice such as this. I’ve never seen slow-motion decapitation done in such an artful way before that somehow doesn’t come off as gross. Without the proper level of desensitization, 300 would have just been a sickening, incomprehensible mess. But seen with the eyes of our generation, we can understand it as the glorious battle it was.
The History Channel ran a special last night that I recommend as a prerequisite to the film. Here is the setting, as I understand it: Persia is on the warpath and, after a defeat years before at Marathon, intends to invade and crush Greece. At the time, Greece was not a united land but a confederacy of separate city-states. King Leonidas leads an army of 300 of his Spartans, along with a coalition of other Greeks, to hold off the Persian army at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, the only way into Greece by land and a huge bottleneck through which Xerxes needed to get hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Leonidas is able to hold off the vastly superior force for days, eventually falling in battle but sending a message to the rest of his people that a united Greece can stand against even the vast Persian Empire.
What’s not in the movie is a big naval battle going on at the same time. The navy is able to hold off Persia’s ships for a few days before falling back and convincing Athens to retreat. Persia burns Athens to the ground, but the Greeks are able to regroup and defeat the Persian navy at a later battle, causing Persia to stop. After winning the war, Philip II of Macedon is able to unite Greece and father Alexander the Great with Angelina Jolie. Alexander the Great spreads western culture to across the known world. And that is how 300 Spartans’s last stand leads directly to the rise of all of western civilization.