300 - Movie Review and more

I am wondering if the movie should be called 300 or 1800 (each of the 300 men had a 6 Pack Abs which makes it 1800 in all...perhaps even more). My God are those men candidates for the WWF.

Anyways, the movie has breathtaking special effects and the video is kinda different ...excellent colour mixing and beautiful cameramanship. Also, the movie brings a very historic event to light.

Boy were those guys huge. I have been to the Salar Jung Museum and I found the armour and weapons used by Tipu Sultan. I am guessing that the guy who wore that armour was atleast 7 ft tall and had a bicep that was bigger than my chest :)....on top of it these guys wear these things (weighing close to a 150 kgs if I am right), and fight with them. My God, were people strong. I suspect if even Arnold Schw (ok I always forget his spelling), couldve lifted it, let alone fight with it.

Spartans have an excellent history and I have always enjoyed reading about them. Something about history and wars always fascinates me as a subject, and that shows in my liking toward the game Age of Empires.

300 is a very nice movie. Worth the watch in the theatres. Especially for its special effects. I wonder how it is, to be a man, who walks toward his death with a smile in his face. I guess I have already blogged about such men when I wrote about Bhagat Singh in Rang De Basanti.

The sad thing about history is that, one can never really be sure of what "REALLY" happened.

We have seen that always the victorious rewrite history and we get a very impressive information about a king who "could" have been a tyrant.

Only a Time Machine can tell us the truth. The information we have about a king or a society in history, may just be an authors version in a scroll.

Let us take for instance, Emperor Ashoka,

Wiki says:

"Information about the life and reign of Ashoka primarily comes from a relatively small number of Buddhist sources. In particular, the Sanskrit Ashokavadana ('Story of Ashoka'), written in the 2nd century, and the two Pāli chronicles of Sri Lanka (the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa) provide most of the currently known information about Asoka. Additional information is contributed by the Edicts of Asoka, whose authorship was finally attributed to the Ashoka of Buddhist legend after the discovery of dynastic lists that gave the name used in the edicts (Priyadarsi – meaning 'favored by the Gods') as a title or additional name of Ashoka Mauriya."


The truth may be that Emperor Ashoka was just a figment of imagination (of course this seems ridiculous, because you have studied about him since your childhood, but believe me, you havent seen him, so it is not science to be proven with a fact), it could very well be something that Emperor Ashoka "wanted" to be written, while the fact may have been something else.
So in essence, if these few books were to be destroyed, or we get another book that contradicts what is stated here then we have totally gotten history wrong.

Another example maybe the events surrounding the death of King Tut.Initially there was a theory, and later it changed after some new evidence came to light and so on...

The point I am trying to make here is that the country/king/society that Won a war or a battle gets to write history. They get to say what is correct.

For example, consider the movie "Pearl Harbour". The movie evokes sympathy toward the 2000 odd Americans who were killed. But what of the 2 million who were eradicated in a matter of 2 days in the Hiroshima Nagasaki bombings. Any death is condemnable, and it is really sad whatever happened. I am not saying Japan was correct in bombing the US, and neither was US correct in bombing Japan.

But there are certain things which are not shown in the movie:


1) The number of people killed in just those 2 days of atomic bombing was equal to perhaps the entire casualty of all the wars taken place before that period.
2) US Killed Civilians in Japan. Japan bombed a military harbour. Reading this article in wiki which talks about the choice of the city to be bombed:

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson struck Kyoto from the list because of its cultural significance, over the objections of General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. According to Professor Edwin O. Reischauer, Stimson "had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier." On July 25 General Carl Spaatz was ordered to bomb one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, or Nagasaki as soon after August 3 as weather permitted and the remaining cities as additional weapons became available.


So Kyoto was spared because some guy in the American military had a good Honeymoon there. (of course not the only reason :) ) Nice.

Are these guys human? They are sitting around discussing which city to obliterate. I would have resigned from that committee had I even had the slightest feeling of humanity in me.

3) A few more months of war wouldve certainly brought defeat to Japan and there was really no need to kill close to 2 million people.
4) A military man can fight another military man in a war. I will never object to it. They both have chosen such a profession and it is their dharma/duty to fight for their country. But killing a civilain is never agreeable to me.
5) If the definition of a terrorist nation is that it bombs innocent civilians, then the US is perhaps the biggest terrorist nation. But what do we see today? Is history not being written by US? Are they not making it look as if whatever they do is for "justice", "Freedom", etc and all that bullshit.
6) Consider this, In Iran, there was a DEMOCRATIC leader called Mossaddegh. Read about him here.

In short, he brought all that "freedom", "liberty", "justice", "equality" crap that the US/UK so fervently advocate but never practice.

But sady, UK wanted Oil. Mossaddegh was not going to bend for the interests of UK. So UK went and told US (since it was too weak after the WW II) that Iran was becoming increasingly communist. So please depose Mossaddegh. US did its part. Sent its CIA goons to do the dirty job. Mossaddegh was deposed. Oil interests of UK restored to normalcy.

In essence the idea is not to provide "equality" blah blahs, but to get oil. Hypocrisy at its core.

7) I cannot even start talking about Iraq. Or Cuba. Or Vietnam. Or Taliban (Afganistan). These guys created the trouble and then they act as if they did this for "humanity" sakes. Bah. I am not a 6 year old kid.

History is littered with Attempts by the US/UK. But whom do we call a villain. Adolf Hitler.

Let me make one thing very clear here. I donot support Adolf. I donot support the US. I hate all forms of violence and killing against civilians and I am entirely against it.

All I wanted to actually talk about was that history is a very lovely subject (a subject of interest for me). But the greated tragedy about this subject is that it was what the historians choose to tell me that I have to listen to, rather than what really happened.

Anyways, I love Americans. I have been there, and it is a very nice country. I love all humans. No offense to a specific country here, but it is something that has to be thought about. I had a lot more to say here, but I will stop with this because I may unintentionally hurt the feelings of some.

And oh ya, movie gets a 7/10 from me.

:)
cheers
cb