In any historical context the movie is laughable, at best. If you regard it as a wholly fictional work, then it's a fun movie, the problem is, the film itself doesn't treat itself like that.
Okay there are some minor spoilers if you read this.
There is a hunchback who is grossly and unrealistically deformed.
Wolves look really fucking weird.
Xerxes is eight feet tall, easily, and from the scenes which he appears on clifftops in he's apparently capable of teleportation.
There are a bunch of inbred priests who somehow live up on a mountain with naked oracles and are able to eat.
There are bizarrely-equipped war elephants and rhinoceri.
A twelve-foot tall ogre is part of the Persian army.
There is a tree of dead bodies.
There is a fat man with blades for arms.
Xerxes has a portable fleet of deformed lesbians, and an additional fleet of deformed super-warriors, but somehow their deformities which are identical to the priests' turn them into fighting machines rather than weird monsters.
Everyone can jump about twenty feet in the air.
Arrows actually blot out the sun.
If you pause for one moment to actually think about the movie the "it treats itself as history" argument falls apart under the sheer weight of the completely absurd contents of the film. Snyder treats it as history but that's because if you read any interviews with him he actually doesn't understand self-awareness as it relates to filmmaking.
If you want to make a complaint about it possibly misrepresenting a culture then you need to address the problem that our society has with media literacy and interpretation. For God's sake, Norbit was a popular movie. Our culture endorses and popularizes mindless crap because it's easy and because it's pushed on us. That Borat was a success is a decent sign although it was distressing to hear people behind me in the theatre
not fucking know where Georgia is.
If you understand that 300 is an absolute flight of fancy based on actual events, like about 70% of war movies and 100% of movies about the Alamo, then the movie doesn't create a problem. Anybody who comes out of that movie feeling that they've sat through a course on Spartan history and are feeling wiser about it are illustrative more of a social issue than a problem with a
film based on a graphic novel by Frank Fucking Miller, who has given us such wonderful concepts as a Batman who says, "What are you, dense? Are you retarded or something?
I'm the goddamn Batman." He's responsible for an upcoming graphic novel entitled
Holy Terror, Batman! He wrote the entirety of
Sin City, which is absolutely laden with completely ridiculous events. The man's had an entire career of coming up with awesome concepts that also contain nothing but absolute ridiculousness*.
And at the moment? At the moment we're over-analyzing a film which features even more ridiculous and stupid elements than this and treating it as a dangerous weapon, as a ticking time bomb. It's not. If there are any politics, the politics are against expansion and invasion and imperialism - which if you consider Iran's perspective as a small country which has refused to back down to U.S. and Coalition demands, even with a completely insane but rather brave leader, suddenly becomes a fascinating element. To tell the truth, if we talk about the politics of this movie which is big and dumb and about heroes and villains and really nothing bigger than good versus evil and freedom versus slavery and blah blah blah they
shoulda shot it in black and white, then honestly I'm going to keep arguing from that perspective. I can even start culling some lines from Xerxes and the rest of the Persians.
Oh and uh that article nicely skirts the Spartan-led Battle Of Plataea which drove the Persians back out of Greece but that's alright I guess, can't expect an article about history to mention everything I suppose. And as an afterthought regarding the pederasty thing, it's the word of ancient Greek comedians - these are the dudes who required dudes in their comedies to have giant prop phalluses, remember - versus Plutarch and Cicero, for God's sake. That's a history lesson from Carlos Mencia.
Phew! I think I've said enough serious things about the completely silly movie. I wish people would just treat silly movies as silly movies! I don't understand why everyone feels a need to do otherwise when there are quite enough movies which aren't silly already that they can choose from.
*except for the "goddamn batman" bit, that's just stupid and not entertaining at all