This time the director is Zack Snyder, known for his music videos, and the location is a studio set in Montreal with green backgrounds later filled by superb computer-generated graphics and the whole storybook style is based on the graphic novel by co-producer Frank Miller. "300" takes the same basic narrative and presents it in an utterly different style in a blood-fest when "The Wild Bunch" meets "Kill Bill" and the visuals are like nothing except "Sin City". The story was first told on film in 1962 when director Rudolph Maté went to Greece and shot a worthy, but conventional and surprisingly leaden, version entitled "The 300 Spartans", starring American Richard Egan as King Leonidas and the British David Farrar as Xerxes. Whatever the actual figures, the odds against the Spartans were terrible, death was inevitable, and their honour secure. In truth, the Spartans were backed by a mixed force of almost 7,000, while there are enormous variations in modern estimates of the multi-ethnic Persian army, but somewhere between 100,000-200,000 seems realistic. The 480 BC Battle of Thermopylae is the stuff of military legend when, in popular lore, a mere 300 Spartans commanded by King Leonidas held off a Persian force led by Xerxes the Great that Herodotus claimed as 2.6 million.
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