cdbeck
Posts: 1374
Joined: 8/16/2005
From: Indiana
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: a white rabbit
..like the movie's fine but it wasn't fantasy, it was real, they really did it and they really died..
..there's better movies on the subject..
Sorry, **a** white rabbit. I know I am being overly post-modern, but technically every depiction of historical events has a good dose of fiction within it, unless you were actually there. Because the human mind embellishes nearly everything that enters it, because it isn't all that great at cataloging minute detail so it fills in the gaps, even eye witness reports are notoriously fictional (this is psychologically proven).
Herodotus wrote one of the first accounts of the 300 (who actually had another 700 Thesbians and Thebans backing them up). Herodotus was born 4 years before the battle, and didn't write about it until about 50 years later. He says that 1,400 people killed 25,000, even with tactical advantage, that seems unlikely (of course he numbers the Persian army in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions (he says that there were alone 10,000 immortals). That is highly unlikely, as populations (even within Xerxes mighty empire) of the largest cities rarely ran much higher than 10,000. Ancient and Medieval numbers are notoriously bad, because there was no accurate counting system and typically the writer was not actually on the battlefield. So he usually just "guesses," saying "millions" when he really means "a lot." The entire story of the 300 is technically historical fiction from the start.
Further, just because fantastic things are added, doesn't mean that historical value is lost. The Illiad and the Odyssey are a bit fantastic (the Odyssey more so), does that make them worthless? Saints lived constantly contain dragons, serpents, demons, ghosts, etc (in the orginal texts, not added by Frank Miller  ) So we should call them stupid as well?
Remember, Frank Miller wasn't rewriting Herodotus to make a Histories for the modern age. He was, like many hagiographers (saint's biographers), ancient and medieval historians (just look at Procopius's Secret History, creating entertainment based upon a real life event.
Exactly like movies such as "Saving Private Ryan," "Flags of Our Fathers," "Letters from Iwo Jima," et al. If you are going to judge on accuracy, nothing could make the cut, as every author, storyteller, historian, whatever, adds their own fictional bias to the story.
[/end of post-modern historian rant]
SoM
_____________________________
"Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet!"
(Kill them all. God will know his own.)
-- Arnaud-Armaury, the Albigensian Crusade
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RE: *** MOVIE 300 - REVIEW *** - 
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