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Originally Posted by gunnut
The exaggerations and the farcical depictions of the Persians make more sense if you can see from the point of the story teller.
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It being related by a Spartan soldier is more of a plot device than the central point of the film. I hardly think he knew about the political intrigues back home, for example. Because I'm subjected to maybe one and a half hours of it, it's justified that it modulates away from one man's account into that of the author's. It's what Snyder has presented as the film - he hasn't given consideration to alternative viewpoints, apart from the small possibility that he was being ironic in such instances as when they're on the battlefield between fights... "Haw, haw, aren't we so civilised... hang on, one of them's still alive! SPLAT!"
The possibility that there's supposed to be a major discrepancy between the Spartan retelling and the 'real' opinion is only a technical one. In the absence of any real positive evidence for it, I still think that the film is still very much pro-Spartan.
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It was not meant to demean the Persians from the perspective of the author. But it certainly was meant to dehumanize the Persians from the perspective of the Spartan story teller.
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Maybe not the Persians - it doesn't really matter who the enemy is in that film, it's just there to provide cannon fodder. Apart from the Cleopatra-on-her-barge-like scene in Xerxes' tent, there is very little real exposition on the Persians, unlike the Spartans.
What I'm thinking is that it's artistically childish to consistently characterise virtually all the antagonists - hey, every good film has antagonists (!) - as disfigured or monstrous, and to cast the good guys always with rippling abs. Seriously, what was the point of making the priests, the traitor and one of the women in the tent so afflicted with disease, and the camera lingering on those deformations?