The Uncouth, Uniracial, Spartans

Neal Stephenson talks about the surreal nature of many 300 reviews. He mentions one of the big criticisms of the movie:

All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained [...]

It gets worse.

But such criticisms aren’t really worth arguing with, because they are not serious in the first place — and that is their whole point. Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Damn you, Frank Miller (for writing the comic in 1999)!