300

I have not seen this movie yet…it seems like it’s just going to be crappy characters with cool visuals and effects.

Washington Post's critic Stephen Hunter considers the film "too cartoonish to be taken seriously". He criticized the action as being "all showy and stylized, never quite realistic."

Robby Eksiel said moviegoers would be dazzled by the "digital action" but irritated by the "pompous interpretations and one-dimensional characters.”

Critics seem to be slamming the actual plot and characters of the movie and those seem like essential elements to the quality of any movie (even an action epic). However, the mass public is spending record amounts of money on seeing it anyway—maybe because of its heavy advertising on MySpace!?!

300 is getting a lot of the same critical complaints that David Lean’s epics got in the early 60’s. Now, I happen to really like David Lean epics: Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr. Zhivago (1965). Some critics called them visual spectacles with no depth, or “Oscar Packaged” movies.

At least David Lean epics compelled other critics to say they were intelligent, literate, and more believable than most epic film scripts. This is very unlike 300 because I haven’t found one review without a “but” in it.

Maybe I’m being too hard on 300…maybe it’s just critically misunderstood like Lawrence of Arabia (which is now designated as one of the American Film Institute’s top 5 American movies of ALL TIME)…but I doubt it.