Why No Love for 300?

Why are movie critics smashmouthing 300 while the paying public is eating it up wiht both hands? Victor Davis Hanson, a pretty mean classicist and an excellent writer, gives us a few ideas:

Why the liberal furor over 300? Aside from criticism leveled against the plot, cinematography, dialogue, etc. there seems to be an almost elemental anger that such a ‘simplistic’ take on good and evil—West good, East bad—reduced to comic book simplicity has hoodwinked the Neanderthal class in the way they were led by the nose to Iraq by the Bush/Cheney nexus.

But what they fail to grasp is why 300 took off, and, say for example, Oliver Stone’s Alexander bombed, a take that had all the hot-button Hollywood issue from easy homosexuality to the inner crisis over ‘what it all means.’ But critics forget that there were 4 key differences between those two films:

Read the rest. The Battle of Thermopylae lands sparely in the middle of Hanson’s historical expertise (and is something he’s written about extensively) so he knows whereof he speaks.

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