Paul and I saw 300 tonight. I was seriously disappointed.

I was most disappointed aesthetically. The movie failed to connect its loudly-proclaimed broad abstractions to its concretes, mostly notably in the case of the ideas of reason and freedom. Consider a few examples.

First, Leonidas was supposed to be uncompromising. He wasn’t swayed by the appeals of Xerxes (and the deformed Ephialtes) to be reasonable by submitting to Persian rule. Yet he compromised from the very start, not just by submitting to the mystical demands of the Ephors, but then by circumventing their demands without directly challenging them. The fact that he did so begrudgingly, as a necessity of Spartan political life, shows him to be open to compromise in the name of necessity. So why not compromise with the Persians too? Just because, I guess.

Second, the Spartans were repeatedly said to be superb warriors, not just for their strength, courage and skills, but also for their use of reason. However, the training of the youth was not just purely physical, but also mostly the endurance of pains like freezing cold human brutality. Even worse, the training was positively irrational, e.g. the young men had to steal food to live, then would be brutally punished if caught. Unsurprisingly then, the Spartans showed basically no ingenuity in battle in the movie. They relied solely on their strength, skill, discipline, courage, and even indifference to life — not on any clever tactics. In contrast, Herodotus recounts that the Spartans would often fake retreats, then turn back en masse to slaughter unwary Persians. It’s significant that that bit of actual history was omitted from the movie, I think.

Third, Sparta was clearly portrayed in the movie as a fundamentally totalitarian society. (That’s certainly accurate.) Yet those concrete facts were never reconciled with all the Spartan talk about the value of freedom. So really, what made life under Persian rule so much worse than life under Spartan rule? That totalitarianism was also grossly inconsistent with Sparta’s supposed ideal of reason. Unsurprisingly, no rationale was ever offered for Sparta’s overwhelmingly militaristic culture: it was just supposed to be obviously superior to a city in which the army is composed of reservist potters and sculptors.

Fourth, and perhaps most galling of all, the final heroism of the Spartans was portrayed as nothing short of senseless adherence to duty. The Spartans were forbidden from retreating in battle. They could only stay, fight, and die — and that’s what they did. To retreat was portrayed as obvious cowardice — yet the movie Spartans had absolutely no rational reason to stand their ground. As recounted by Herodotus, the Spartans stayed for a very rational reason: the unprepared Greek city-states to the south desperately needed time to muster their forces. The Spartans fought at the pass after the betrayal to hold off the Persians for a bit longer. Unlike in the movie, where all were slaughtered immediately, the real Spartans achieved that purpose with their deaths.

These failures to connect the abstract ideals of the movie with its concretes was the reason why, I think, the dialogue of the movie often seemed like a disconnected series of stirring but empty one-liners. It was, to put it in terms of Leonard Peikoff’s “DIM Hypothesis,” very much M1. It aspired to be more than the writers could muster, I think.

That’s not to say that I didn’t like some of the elements of the movie. I very much enjoyed the characters of Leonidas and Gorgo. Plus, those nearly-naked Spartan soldiers were mighty easy on the eyes. I decided not to focus on those better elements of the movie not just because I regard them as inessential, but also because I’ve already seen much praise for the movie, including from Objectivists.

Overall, I thought the movie a serious failure. That was disappointing.