300

This movie looks so damn cool.

You never really get over being a comic book geek. It stays with you, in the back of your mind, that time when you would greedily get each new issue from the shop, individually wrapped in its own plastic cover, pore over the pages and let yourself dream just for a little about super-powers and impossibly proportioned women.

When I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year I went to the Dark Horse stand and saw the promotional posters for a new graphic novel from Frank Miller called 300. Now, Miller is an icon in the industry, and famous for some of the best comic work ever done (Batmam:Year One, Hard Boiled, Ronin, The Dark Knight Returns, and Sin City [also a movie]). I have original editions of most of those.

300 is the story of how a vastly outnumbered group of 7,000 Greek warriors from various city-states fought off a hoard of over 100,000 invading Asians at Thermopylae. The symbolism of the eventual victory of the Greek democratic city-states over the invading hoard of slave-warriors led by a despotic king has been blown up over time to represent the triumph of liberal democracy as an ideology over dictatorial, monarchic rule. But what really makes this story are the heroes (Leonidas, king of the Spartans), the villains (Xerxes, king of Egypt), and the drama of their confrontation.

In any case, the movie looks awesome.