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300
Warner Bros. Pictures


6.9

based on 35 reviews
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How did we calculate this?

based on 785 votes
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FILM:

Dawn of the Dead

GAMES:

300: March to Glory (PSP)

MPAA RATING: R for graphic battle sequences throughout, some sexuality and nudity

Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West, David Wenham, Vincent Regan, Michael Fassbender, Tom Wisdom, and Andrew Pleavin

Based on the epic graphic novel by Frank Miller, 300 is a ferocious retelling of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae in which King Leonidas (Butler) and 300 Spartans fought to the death against Xerxes and his massive Persian army. Facing insurmountable odds, their valor and sacrifice inspire all of Greece to unite against their Persian enemy, drawing a line in the sand for democracy. (Warner Bros.)

GENRE(S):	Action \| Adventure \| Drama \| War
WRITTEN BY:	Zack Snyder Kurt Johnstad Michael Gordon Frank Miller and Lynn Varley (graphic novel)
DIRECTED BY:	Zack Snyder
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: July 31, 2007 Theatrical: March 9, 2007
RUNNING TIME:	116 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Gianni Truzzi

Director Zack Snyder uses his computers to create ferocious and painterly images, with as much attention to each frame as a hand-drawn panel.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

300 is a feast for the senses (well, two of them anyway) and an impressive technical achievement. More than that, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Not since Mario Bava's "Hercules in the Haunted World" has Greco-Roman movie-house mythmaking been so thoroughly well-conceived and executed.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

300 is a movie blood-drunk on its own artful excess. Guys of all ages and sexes won't be able to resist it.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Look, but don't be touched: There is much to see but little to remember in this telling of a battle we are meant never to forget.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

300 may not offer masterful storytelling in a conventional sense, but it's hard to beat as a spectacle and that makes it worthwhile viewing for all but the most squeamish of potential audience members.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

300 is a huge step forward in visually sophisticated storytelling.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

It's impossible not to be moved by its nearly nonstop visual assault.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Cinema has once again proven its ability to incorporate every other mass-media art form. Director Zack Snyder and his computer wizards have made the best example yet of the movie-as-comic-book.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Significantly, this hyper-stylization of 300 is limited to its visuals. The performances are played straight, and this combination -- straight performances and stylized visuals -- produces an uncanny effect.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It may not be by-the-book history -- a relative term in any event, when discussing the ancients whose worldview embraced men, gods and monsters -- but what a spectacle!

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

In epic battle scenes where he combines breathtaking and fluid choreography, gorgeous 3-D drawings and hundreds of visual effects, director Zack Snyder puts onscreen the seemingly impossible heroism and gore of which Homer sang in "The Iliad."

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

The movie swings back and forth from awesome to awful so regularly and rapidly that it's like a jai alai match.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

300 is at its best when it settles for purely visceral thrills, such as Leonidas' battle against a hulking warrior twice the size of a normal man. The movie's broad strokes are all superlative: It's the details that keep 300 from being anything more than a striking curiosity.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The action epic 300 is so overblown, overheated and over the top that on some level, it's fun to get caught up in the operatic dizziness of it.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

This is a mixed blessing. For a story replete with open-air combat 300 is strangely claustrophobic. And for a film with lotsa flesh and even more blood, it's light on flesh-and-blood characters.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A blustery, bombastic, visually arresting account of the Battle of Thermopylae as channeled through the rabid imagination of graphic novelist Frank Miller.

Empire Will Lawrence

Visually stunning, thoroughly belligerent and as shallow as a pygmy’s paddling pool, this is a whole heap of style tinged with just a smidgen of substance.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

My deepest objection to the movie is that it is so blood-soaked. When dialogue arrives to interrupt the carnage, it's like the seventh-inning stretch.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

Part of the fascination of the Thermopylae story is that it really happened, and it helped define real heroism. There's nothing remotely like reality to be had in this film.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

The disconnect between the human actors and the digital backgrounds is more pronounced here than in a futuristic adventure like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," and because classic Hollywood cinema is so rich with epic images of antiquity, this can't help but seem chintzy.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Sensory gluttony is reason enough to see a movie, and few epics overstuff the eyes like this one.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

That it's so flat as an action movie probably has a lot to do with why people might prefer to jawbone over its putatively controversial aspects--there's really not much of a “wow” factor to revel in.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

300 is "Gladiator" for the gamer set.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Just about everything in this pea-brained epic is overscaled and overwrought – it's a cartoon trying to be a towering triptych.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

300 is something to see, but unless you love violence as much as a Spartan, Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated.

Slate Dana Stevens

300 will be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it's so curiously unaffecting.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

As you watch -- no, endure -- this flattened-out spectacle, there's really nothing worth pondering save for a single thought: What a difference a director makes.

The New Yorker David Denby

Pop has always drawn energy from the lower floors of respectability; this movie, in which fan-boy cultism reaches new levels of goofy chaos and sexual confusion, draws energy from the subbasement.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Another movie -- Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "Team America," whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of 300 -- calculated the cost [of freedom] at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that 300 aspires to become.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

300 presents a dual clash of civilizations. An action adventure that pits thousands of Persians against 300 brave Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, it also pits millions of fans of brainless violence against a gallant band, or so I choose to think of us, who still expect movies to contain detectable traces of humanity.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's kind of a ghastly hoot, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness.

Village Voice Nathan Lee

It's a ponderous, plodding, visually dull picture, but the blame shouldn't be put on Snyder's skills per se, and has nothing to do with his ambition to blur the distinction between CGI and photography. Frankly, it's the slavish, frame-by-frame devotion to Miller's source material that's the problem.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 785 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Al Q gave it a4:
I would buy the DVD if it featured a version without dialogue, which was uniformly dopey. In fact, the whole script looked like it was written by a team of 8th-graders on a glue bender. Anyone who didn't want to kill the narrator 15 minutes into the film wasn't paying attention.

Trent K. gave it a9:
Love the style, subject matter and acting in this movie. This is totally original filmmaking. Something like I've never seen before. I like how faithful it was to the graphic novel.

Kass B gave it a0:
Oily men in loin cloths rubbing each other down and kicking each other into pools of Vaseline while wearing gold necklaces and tongue rings that hang from their eyebrows? I'm gay and even this is too gay for me.

Fábio H. gave it a3:
This movie is way too overrated. Everyone just talked so much about it that I had to watch it myself, and I found it disappointing. All I could see was some few scenes of nudity and endless nonsense violence. People fighting, hacking, slashing, piercing, and that's all I can remember whenever I think of this movie. It doesn't have a notable plot, just endless nonsense fighting. I don't know about you, but that's just not enough to make me enjoy a movie. The costumes and the graphical area were great, but that's all. I even found it funny that all of the Persians had to be pierced, deformed or ugly freaks in some way while the Spartans were all strong men with sculpted bodies and high morals. That's just disrespectful to Persian people. Spartan women are shown as beautiful, moral and full of rights, while the only Persian women that appear in the movie are nude dancers. Actually, it should be taken into consideration that Persian women had a lot more political/social/economical rights than Spartan women, but despite of that, in the beginning of the movie, they make it sound like the Persian women were mistreated and the Spartan women had many more freedoms. Oh, and of course, let's all remember that the film is REALLY distant from the historical facts. It wasn't just 300 men fighting there, and the Persian army wasn't made of "millions", no ancient army could be so big. Sparta was nothing like freedom or democracy, despite of whatever this movie shows. I think it is just another propaganda tool to denigrate Iranians and the eastern people, and show the west as the moral, "good", and democratic system, that has to fight the "evil", tyrannic and immoral eastern forces.

Phil M. gave it a10:
I can't begin to understand why anyone wouldn't like this movie. The message of the movie is to not take crap from anyone. And it seems the people who hate this movie have a sexual fantasy with the government bossing them around.

Chris gave it a2:
The only way to enjoy this movie is if you are in a fit of 'roid rage...however, even then it may be difficult to sit through this entire film, given how sore your ass will be from the injection.

Matt A. gave it a6:
Saw this for the first time the other day and it was okay but Watchmen is going to kick this movie's ass.

300 Warner Bros. Pictures

300
Warner Bros. Pictures