Prequel To 300…Why?

by Chris Vegvary

Did I miss something? The movie 300, which came out in 2007, was based on a graphic novel and loosely based on real-life events that happened so long ago that who knows how mystical people actually were back then, and featured the deaths of three hundred Spartan warriors at the hands of the Persians and their leader, King Xerxes. So…didn’t Zack Snyder, the director of the film 300, say all he needed to say with the first film? Aren’t there films out there that don’t need to have their story told from different angles and points-of-view? Apparently not.

This movie isn’t just a prequel, however. It takes place before, during and after the movie 300, and I really can’t even fathom what the story thinks it’s about. For me, the summary is just a jumble of words mashed together that makes no sense, but I hope to have a clearer idea once I decide to watch a trailer. The thing is, the first movie was about the three hundred Spartan soldiers that pushed back the Persians for quite a while before they were overwhelmed and killed. The movie was highly stylized and seemed more based in fantasy rather than on what actually happened. But I wasn’t alive back then, so I can’t say for sure that all the events portrayed, weird as some of it may have seemed, didn’t actually happen.

So why do we need a prequel or a sequel, or anything to the movie 300? It just doesn’t seem necessary. Not that anything Hollywood does is necessary or rational in most cases, but these sorts of things happen anyway. People say Hollywood is running out of ideas, and I don’t think that’s totally true. What’s actually happening is that they’re not willing to take a chance (most of the time) on losing money with an unknown intellectual property, and so they milk the crap out of anything they can, even making prequels or sequels to movies that are already past their prime (I’m talking to you, 2011’s The Thing).

Regardless of whether or not we need another entry in the 300 film series, it’s happening. There’s nothing we can do to stop it, so I suppose we might as well suck it up and wait for it to come out on cable or Blu-Ray. However, if you’re excited to see this movie, then I honestly hope you enjoy it, and I tell you now that I intend to see it at some point, just not in the theaters. I can wait. And who knows? Maybe it’ll be better than the first one.