Rescuing the World
I just watched Frank Miller’s ‘300′ again today. It truly is an impressive work. This story is impossible to tell without the extreme violence. To the filmaker’s credit, they tone down the gore and blood quite a bit by stylizing the spurts and splashes into mostly dark brown droplets. There is hardly any bright red in the movie other than the capes worn by the Spartans. It’s very artful, clever, and historically significant (if not 100% accurate). This is an important chapter in human history that occurred a mere 2,500 years ago and it was about freedom.
What caught my attention more than the viseral imagery and over-the-top Persians was the story and the characters. King Leonidas, his wife Queen Gorgo, and Dilios are fantastic characters. Xerxes the outlandish megalomaniac scoffs at the idea of a few hundred Spartans stopping his advance.
And so the Spartans and the Persians meet at Thermopylae. I won’t drag you through the whole history, but except for the dramatic visualizations, the movie brilliantly tells the tale of several incredible days of battle for freedom. See Wikipedia for an impressive retelling of the Battle of Themopylae.
My point in bringing all this up is the quote by Dilios at the end of the film. It is now a year later and the Greeks are several thousand troops strong and resisting another invasion by the Persians. In the final moments of the movie, he says:
This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine…
What a shame that things didn’t quite work out that way… but imagine… what if we could rid the world of superstition and myth? Truly, that would be the dawning of a future that I look forward to and desperately want to be a part of.
And the people replied…