A Wide Array of Conflicts in the Film 300 - Essay Example

300 is one of the biggest budget movies in recent memory and yet another comic book movie that uses new technology to make an incredible visual display. 300 is a fundamentally a tragedy, with nearly every major character dying through the course of the movie, and a very serious, dramatic (if overblown) treatment of the topic. The basic plot is that a Persian king, Xerxes I of Persia, who is on the path of world conquest, decides to invade Greece and take over the entire area. Because it is a time of celebration, the King of Sparta must ask sages whether he is allowed to take the army of Sparta, a Greek city-state focused on martial prowess, to go head off Xerxes.

The sages, who are under the pay of the Persian Empire, decline his offer, paving the way for invasion by Persia. The King of Sparta decides to side-step this issue, by going for “a walk” with a “personal bodyguard” of only three hundred soldiers, to go defend a narrow mountain pass that the Persians must use to enter Greece. They then go on to beat back wave after wave of Persian troops, inflicting huge casualties. Eventually, all three hundred of the Greek soldiers are killed, but the psychological damage they inflicted ended up being decisive, with the Persian army, who had lost so many thousands fighting only three hundred Spartan warriors baulk at facing the full force of Sparta when they invade the city.

The style of this is incredibly overblown and artistic. Everything from the gore to the monsters to the regular characters is heavily re-done through computer generated graphics, and the entire style is fantastical, trying to match the comic book style of its predecessor.