300 BSG

Spoiler alert for 300 and BSG season finale.

Over the weekend I saw the movie 300. If you have ever wondered what the cross section of a neck looks like then this is the movie for you. It's also good if you're looking for a bunch of cool fight scenes. That is what I was looking for so I enjoyed it.

300 is about 300 Spartans taking on the Persian army. The Spartans are portrayed as about as cool and manly as can be (and as someone on slate commented, there are 300 Spartans and about 2,000 abs). The Persians are on the other hand a collection of weird looking monsters that only beat the 300 because there is something like a million of them. When I say monsters I mean it literally (the movie is based on a graphic novel so reality wasn't the top priority). The president of Iran as well as others have protested the movie saying that it is racist.

I see where the president of Iran is coming from on this one. But I think that if you really watch the movie the message is very different (not that I think the writers had this in mind) - a small group of men who have been raised to be tough and fight take on a huge army. The small group has helmets, shields, spears and swords. The huge army has numerous weapons including riding various animals, uses archers to attack from the sky, and makes use of superior technology to create grenades. The large army wants a small token of water and earth and wants influence over the government. The small army wants its independence. The fighters in the large army are forced into the situation by their king. The fighters in the small army are there by choice. The fighters in the small army consider the greatest thing they could do to die in battle for their country. The small army uses their knowledge of their country to gain the advantage.

Hmmm - which conflict does that make you think of?

Then the message - when the group of 300 is eventually killed by the larger force it inspires all of the Spartans as well as all the other groups in Greece to assemble and go to war. At the end of the movie it is fairly clear that when all of the Greeks come together they will win against the Persians. I'm surprised this movie isn't being spread throughout the insurgency as inspiration. Yes - the skin colors are reversed, but is that really that hard to think past?

I guess the interesting aspect of watching 300 for an American is to ask which group you are rooting for.

If you haven't seen the season finale of BSG - stop reading now.

Anyway, on to BSG. I realize that basically everything I am about to say is just repeating other people, but I feel the need to say it myself. Whoa - that was crazyness! Sort of reminded me of the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey. One interesting point someone brought up is that Tigh is too old to be a cylon. I realize they can always work something in or just ignore it as they sometimes like to do, but seems like Adama has known him too long for the writers to say that the cylons just planted memories of the first cylon war and all the time before cylons figured out how to look like humans. It is also a little odd to me the people they chose. Chief and Tigh make sense, but the other two, especially Roslin's assistant, seem too minor - the final 5 were so built up it seemed like it had to be really key people or people they haven't introduced yet but are really special for some reason. Also as Julie points out - what's that mean for Chief's baby and is Hera now less special? Given all that, I still mostly believe they will turn out to be cylons based on the way they all just knew when they walked into the room. As far as Starbuck, for some reason I hope she's really alive, although it would be a cool Star Wars reference if striking her down only made her stronger and allows her to appear to Apollo and guide him.

For those that didn't see the news:
SCI FI has renewed Battlestar Galactica for a full fourth season, commissioning 22 hour-long episodes of "the best show on television." This will include a special two-hour extended event that will air during fourth quarter 2007 and be released on DVD by Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Production will resume in May with an eye toward a early 2008 season premiere.

I was also reading somewhere that they are going to release a sound track around the same time as the two hour event which should include their version of all along the watch tower (I hope so - it was a cool cover of the song - really I think they should let you download the mp3 off the scifi website or at least buy it off iTunes now). When they say 2008 I fully expect that immediately after the ball drop they will show the first episode of season 4 - although sounds like they won't even start production until May 2008 (I can't imagine that they would start production in May 2007 and not show the episodes until 2008). Watching a show in real time sucks. I watched seasons 1 and 2 and the miniseries over the course of half of season 3 and it was great - when I really wanted to watch the next I could and when I felt like a break I took one. Getting new episodes to watch at someone else's whim is lame.

Well, I feel like I've done enough speculating on what will happen next in a fictional story. If I've already said most of this to you - sorry that I just repeated the whole thing here.