Word: leonidases
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Inevitably, the Italians did their Thermopylae epic. It was called The 300 Spartans, starred Richard Egan as Leonidas and was told with more finesse than 300, though without quite the digital flair. It was no masterpiece either.
As in the original, Leonidas (Phantom of the Opera's Gerald Butler) goes to the swinish holy men, the Ephors, for permission to wage a defense against the million-man army of the Persian monarch Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, from Lost). The oracle waffles, but Leonidas, saying he's just going...
Miller pictures Leonidas as a hero of Hestonian features (though Butler looks like a sturdier Soupy Sales). He gives a lot of cross-species personality to his villains. He draws the Ephors as pigmen with pigment. And Ephialtes is Miller's Gollum: misshapen in body and mind, eager to please...
All right, any movie, from Happy Feet to Hannibal Rising, can be a metaphor for Iraq. But we'll pass along the percolating argument that Leonidas is George W. Bush. In brief: Over the protests of the highest government (the Ephors or the U.N.), a commander-in-chief goes to...
Mind you, the Spartans might also be the Iraqi insurgents, leaving their homes to repel a foreign invader. Or they could be seen as Greece's private mercenary army initiating their own mischief: a Blackwater USA of the Aegean. Or Stephen Colbert, analyzing the movie on his show, could be...