Originally Posted by aecp
Oh I wasn't offended, just thouroghly confused. It was kind of hard to tell if you were being ironic all the time with the "tyrant of the axis of evil" comment and then linking to a site with a speech from Dick Cheney.
Well, that's a question of personal prefference, isn't it. From the looks of things, 300 will certainly be trashy in many regards but I still hope to enjoy it. The way I see it there's room for both quality and "spectacular crap" when it comes to fiction set against historical backgrounds. Sure there's Shakespeare and Robert Graves, but if someone'd rather read Conn Iggulden I don't see any reason to get pissed about it.
Actually I think both of those are worse because people might actually believe that they're telling the true stories whereas 300 is just to over-the-top to be taken seriously. That doesn't mean that 300 will be a better movie, just that you'd have to be pretty gullible to actually take it at face value.
Well that would say more about the state of education today than anything else, wouldn't it? And I'm not saying that everyone should know the details of ancient Sparta, just that you'd expect people to be capable of separating good sources from bad ones, 300 being completely off the scale in that regard.
In closing, I think it's better when fiction is very honest about being just fiction, as in the case of 300. I think its much more likely that people whose only knowledge of the Roman Empire comes from Gladiator will be saying: "So... Commodus murdered Marcus Aurelius, but then a general-turned gladiator killed him in the arena and restored the republic and everyone lived happily ever after? Great, got it!"
