What craziness! 300 to stand against and army of 150,000 Persians. This is what the movie portrays. You keep hearing of the 300 Spartans and not how many other Greeks showed up for the battle. Just that the other Greeks were farmers, blacksmiths, merchants and the like.

Don’t get me wrong, this movie was great! AMAZING even!

Several of the guys and I went to see it and it appeared that many other groups of men stood around waiting to see this movie. The showing we went to was at 9:40 at IMAX on Sunday. Sadly when we went to buy tickets on Wednesday this was the first showing that was NOT sold out! We all sat around talking starting about 9pm. Seemed many others had the same idea we did, come early. We made it into the first lineup (the broke it into two lines so other patrons could come into the theater for other movies) and they closed the ropes behind me. There were all kinds of theories about what the movie was going to be like and what it was about. My favorite, made me want to punch the guy, was that it was Christians fighting Muslims. I turned to him and said, “You must have slept in history class when you were little huh?”

Unfortunately I found out quickly that most people thought that this is what that movie was about. The didn’t know the history of the Greek/Persian relationship that started with Darius’ loss at the Battle of Marathon in 490B.C. nor how Xerxes wanted to exact revenge on Greece when he came to power in 486B.C. after his fathers death while trying to stop rebellions within the Persian empire. Persia at the time had conquered the known world minus Greece.

So I kind of felt bad for people going into this movie as they seemed to be going for the wrong reasons. Hell, I would have been fine with just people wanting to see the movie for pure entertainment purposes such as the reason I went. But, thinking that this was about the Christian/Muslim relations of that day, I think tensions continue to mount because of things like this happening.

Please, if you go to see this movie as a historian or for historical fact, know that it is a movie and does not stick to facts. If you go to see this movie because you think it’s about Christians and Muslims going to war, grow up get a history lesson and PLEASE don’t watch this movie. If you’re going for pure entertainment…you’re going to have a blast!