Life made for Combat

300, perhaps the greatest guy movie of all time, is a perfect example of a film that portrays a society in a way that totally defamiliarizes our sense and perception of the ideas we associate with war. The film itself, depicts the glory of war that drives the Spartan society in a way that is totally centered around causing us to perceive war from a different perspective. It is very rare that we think of war as being a glorious thing and nowadays the same goes for being a soldier. As a matter of fact, when I sat down and really started watching the movie for the first time, I remember being totally drawn into the film because it made the idea of war glorious really for the first time in my life. Not only that, but it created a newness in the way I always thought about being a warrior or a soldier. The training the warriors received, the upbringing of their childhood, the physical stature the warriors had in the film, and the way the warriors thought about war defamiliarized me to the idea of being a soldier. Throughout the movie, I saw this theme that being a warrior is a great honor. The film also made me think about the idea that going to war and eventually dying on the battlefield for one's country is the most glorious thing one can do with their life. It defamilarized my sense of what it meant to be a soldier. So rather than continue to talk about it, let's look at the beginning of the film with the way the young boys were trained from their youth. Here, we will look at the way the film depicts the glory of being a soldier through the training these boys had to become soldiers. It is definitely foreign to me, but it causes me to continue to watch it again and again. Maybe, this defamiliarization is the reason I saw the movie four times when it was out in theatres.

Baptized in the Fire of Combat