Zack Snyder’s 300 appears to glorify the culture of ancient Sparta, but it actually condemns the very protagonists it presents its audience with.

Zack Snyder’s 300 deconstructs its heroes, smartly showing the movie’s good guys are not people to be emulated. Based upon Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, 300‘s debut in theaters was met with much consternation in regard to the movie being seen as a racist portrayal of Persians as monstrous villains attacking white protagonists.

At the same time, it was also a major box office hit and the subject of innumerable parodies, memes, and GIFs, with the movie’s reputation as the ultimate monument to over-the-top masculinity seemingly being the only point of agreement among its fans and detractors.

It remains a hot topic among discussion of Snyder’s filmography, but what if there’s more going on in 300 than meets the eye?

What if, rather than holding up Gerard Butler’s King Leonidas and the Spartans he leads into battle as brave men ready to lay down their lives for their people, 300 is actually pulling the wool over the eyes of its audience with protagonists who they should not feel compelled to root for?

It isn’t uncommon for Snyder to fly the true intentions of one of his films under the radar. Depending on which side of the debate one falls on, iron-clad proof of his success or failure in that arena can be seen in the never-ending debate over his take DC’s most iconic characters in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and it will surely continue with the upcoming release of the Justice League Snyder Cut. Still, for as much as 300 has been both praised and condemned, the fact that it’s such a surprisingly cerebral movie has remained a curiously unexplored aspect of it.

The Spartans Are Not Heroes

Despite presenting the Spartans as protagonists, 300 is also quite frank about the cruelty of their society. In the movie’s prologue, an infant Leonidas is shown being inspected with the possibility of being cast off a cliff if any birth defects are uncovered.

The degree to which Spartans prize strength and shun weakness is seen in Leonidas being pulled from his mother during childhood for his training to fight for the Spartan military, where young men endure incredible levels of violence and brutality. To complete his training, an adolescent Leonidas is also left in the snow-covered wilderness, forced to battle a wolf to the death.

Snyder’s (and by extension Miller’s) portrayal of Sparta is, if anything, less barbaric than the reality of life in the city-state, yet 300 nevertheless is quite forthcoming in the harshness that Spartans as a people are indoctrinated into.

The film also presents some comparatively progressive elements for the time within Sparta, including the culture operating as a democracy and the greater freedoms for women seen in the egalitarian role that Lena Headey’s Queen Gorgo holds with her husband Leonidas, the latter even going as far as to consult her in times of doubt. Nevertheless, 300 is entirely forthcoming that Sparta is a thoroughly inhumane culture.

The Movie Is Framed As Propaganda By An Unreliable Narrator

Where 300 becomes a more deeply-layered story is in the role of Dilios, played by David Wenham. As the narrator of the prologue of Leonidas rising to become Sparta’s king, Dilios presents the horrors he and all Spartan men endure in their military training as a story of heroic triumph over bitter adversity rather than the clear exercise in cold-blooded eugenics that it really is.

Dilios further recounts the Battle of Thermopylae to the Spartan soldiers preparing to battle Persia once more, and his aim is clearly to get them charged up for the battle ahead.

In particular, the contributions of soldiers from other Greek city-states are downplayed by Dilios, who describes them as “More brawlers than warriors“, while offering them the rather condescending praise of “They do their part.”

Dilios also spares no effort in passing on the story of the Spartans’ battle against the Persians as a glorious and gallant struggle against an invading force, proclaiming in his re-telling of events “We do what we were trained to do.

What we were bred to do. What we were born to do.” In his presentation of Sparta as both the most civilized culture of ancient times and the greatest warriors the world has ever known, Dilios is ultimately not a historian but a missionary of Spartan glory, as both the portrayal of the culture of Sparta on-screen and his own goal of energizing his fellow soldiers for victory demonstrate.

Zack Snyder Is Intentionally Challenging The Audience’s Sense Of Hero Worship

In both contemporaneous and retrospective analyses of 300, many reviewers have objected to the film’s perceived glorification of xenophobia and human cruelty, along with it presenting Sparta itself as a plateau of freedom.

However, it was the exact aim of Snyder to pull a bait-and-switch on audiences in portraying the Spartans in such a positive light. Snyder would make this point in an interview with Total Film, stating that he sought to place audiences in a tight spot by showing the Spartan’s savagery in blunt terms as people who are prepared to throw newborn children off a cliff if they’re insufficiently healthy, and posing the question “These are the people you’re supposed to go with on this journey?” Elaborating on the point, Snyder felt that “part of the fun” of 300 was to depict a society leaving its sons to fend for themselves as children and only prepared to allow them to return home if they survive, and asking “Those are your heroes?”

For a movie as seemingly simplistic on the surface as 300 is, putting it under a microscope shows that it has a head on its shoulders.

Setting up a binary conflict of an invading empire and a weaker nation making a last ditch effort to hold its own, 300 doesn’t hide the fact of the Spartans being a morally primitive society, yet it relies on its audience being conditioned to reflexively get on board with a designated collection of protagonists, lulling them into cheering for a set of heroes purely because the odds are against them.

After Leonidas and his Spartan comrades have met the glorious end they all dreamed of and Dilios leads the next wave of Spartans into battle, 300′s hidden goal is to leave viewers with the uncomfortable realization that the heroes they followed throughout the movie were anything but.

In both positive and negative readings, 300 has frequently been viewed only in its most basic terms as the either a visually breathtaking action movie or a racist manifesto.

However, not unlike the veiled condemnation of female objectification rampant in geek culture later seen in Snyder’s Sucker Punch, the film quite effectively employs misdirection to hide its true intent, portraying the Spartan’s unhinged worship of their culture and homeland with clear-minded honesty, then leaving viewers to get pulled into the splendor of Spartan might while forgetting that they’re rooting for people with an all-around sick moral compass. The heroes of 300 are not heroes, but in the end, the most unexpected elements of the movie may be that it made the world think that’s what it believes about them.