Now that I've seen Hollywood's take on Thermopylae, I can't wait to see what the focus groups do for the plotting of The Charge of the Light Brigade. Perhaps they'll have Florence Nightingale seduce Lord Cardigan in a plea to end the Crimean War.

A lot of this is Frank Miller, of course, but Plutarch's account of Leonidas's farewell to Gorgo was far more dramatic than the modern rendition (though perhaps equally fictional): why mess with it? (As it is, all the good lines in the movie are from the accounts of antiquity.)

Slim objected to the Spartans polluting their water supply with the bodies of Persian emissaries, but they apparently really did throw the messengers into a well. (The Athenians weren't any more civil.)

Classicist Victor David Hanson reviews the movie in City Journal. Aside from the silly Gorgo-Theron subplot, I liked the movie; the people I was with did not.