300 is the greatest movie involving people with sandals.
I watched 300 yesterday. Needless to say I was impressed. A lot of reviewers hated the movie. However, the problem with reviewers is that they give an absolute score, and if you asked them to justify the number of stars in comparison to other movies, they would fail. For example, does David really think that Spiderman 2 is better than Shaun of the dead?
I’m not saying it’s not, I’m just saying it wouldn’t be hard to find a pair of movies where one is clearly better than the other, yet David (or Margaret) has given them similar scores, or given the worse movie a better score.
So when going for a comparative measure, I think 300 is better than any other movie involving people with sandals, like Troy or Gladiator, or even Braveheart, when measured using any reasonable metric. The amount of chopped limbs is a reasonable metric. The amount of time Brad Pitt is on screen is not a reasonable metric. However, most movie reviewers gave Gladiator glowing reviews, and 300 has been lacking.
This is because they’re idiots. There are no two ways about it. There’s no room for interpretation here, 300 is better than Gladiator in every way, shape, and form, if only because it doesn’t have Russell Crowe, but more specifically because everything that Gladiator tries to do, 300 does bigger, better, and more awesome. It leaves a visual and mental impact like a punch in the face. Contrast with Gladiator, which... what was it about again? 300 is a movie where they’ve taken out all the bullshit. Everything is concise, and they spend every second of film doing cool shit. You cannot say you like Hero or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” without saying you also like 300! To do so makes you a toolbox.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t trust the reviewers on this one, because 300 is one supreme movie. My brother would use the word “epic”.