Neal Stephenson on “300″
Posted on March 19, 2007
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Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, and my favourite Wired article of all time Mother Earth, Mother Board) coincidentally also tackles the issue of 300 as propaganda for the New York Times in It’s All Geek to Me, doing so in his own in indomitable style, and from the perspective of the sci-fi geek:
Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.
…
The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.
If my heavy-handed reproach isn’t to your liking, try Stephenson instead, for he is far more eloquent than I.
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