Hollywood....

Man on man... I just finished 300, for starts very entertaining film... But it made me think how backwards Hollywood can be. The thing is, the Battle of Thermopylae is a very real historical event. While I can appreciate the need to stylize the story for modern culture, and to make it perhaps more visually appealing, I think they could probably have done this and still maintained the true historical significance of the event. Well, I suppose they did get the fact that this helped unite the Greek more as a single people, but they did so ignoring the reason why that happened is because of the alliance between Athens and Sparta. In fact Athens was no where to be seen in the movie, and in fact they forget to mention that Xerxis was actually after Athens on Sparta. Instead they took a very heroic very real story and turned it into a rather cool spectacle of a myth containing little if any actual truth what so ever....

Contrasting this, you have Troy (the more recent movie with Brad Pitt). Now man, if you ever had an opportunity to go nuts with all sorts of cool mythology and fantasy there ya go. An invincible warrior who's only weakness is a single tendon in his heel, the gods all involved playing against each other, and each other's humans, legendary beasts and the most beautiful woman ever to walk the earth... And what does Hollywood do to the story? Make it depressingly mundane... No gods, no invicible warrior (at least they did have him get shot through the Achilles tendon first) and some very pretty, but not in anyway unnaturally so women. I mean really folks, could we at least have a little fun with it?

Well, I'm done being amused at hollywood for the evening, everyone have a great weekend!