300 (dvd) *NEW* Limited Collector's Edition and 50 similar items

Brand new factory sealed oversized collectors edition. Out Of Print and no longer being manufactured. They got the special feature sticker on upside down on the shrinkwrap which gets thrown away anyway. This big and heavy gold foil slipcase contains three disc, a 52 page book, 6 poster reproduction cards, and a motion film image preserved in lucite. The digital copy code has expired. Robert Rodriguez's 'Sin City' was an eye-frying accomplishment--the movie lifted Frank Miller's stark noir fantasy world up off the comic-page and deposited it straight in your face. Zack Snyder's film version of 300--Miller's 1998 graphic-novel re-creation of the bloody battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.--surpasses that feat considerably. Snyder's movie actually improves upon Miller's celebrated graphics. Here, the shadows are denser, the colors more intensely concentrated. Every image throbs with drama--even the steely, shifting skys are troubled and turbulent. You feel you're truly in another world. The film's concerns, like those of Miller's book, are narrow: it seeks only to submerge you in a sea of heroic brutality. It does just that one thing, but it does it with feverish expertise. The story recounts the invasion of ancient Greece by an enormous army, a quarter-million-men strong, under the command of the Persian god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santaro). Several thousand Greeks, few of them seasoned soldiers, hasten to the narrow mountain pass at Thermopylae, hoping to obtain from this cramped corridor a tactical advantage over the enemy's sheer numbers. For two days they manage to repel the invaders. On the third day, a treacherous sheperd betrays the Greeks' position, and as the Persians climb up behind and begin to surround them, the leader of the defenders' most battle-hardened contingent, the Spartan King Leonidis (Gerard Butler), sends the bulk of the Greek forces home to mount rearguard defenses while he and his three hundred men remain at Thermopylae to fight on against impossible odds, to a guaranteed death. Snyder has watered the testosterone in which Miller's comic series was marinated with some less ferocious diversions. He cuts away from the battle occasionally to return to Sparta, where Leonidas' wife, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), struggles to foil the treachery of a falsehearted councilman named Theron (Dominic West). There's also some lurid debauchery in a harem and a visit to a mountaintop where a group of hideous priests contemplate the erotic writhings of a beautiful young Oracle. (One of them stoops to lick her head with his diseased tongue--nice.) Apart from those moments, though, the movie is all blood and guts and raging spectacle. Spears rip through chests, heads fly off necks, and gouts of blood spurt through the air. There's a tree filled with arrow-pierced corpses and a wall of bodies stacked fifteen feet high, waiting to be pushed over onto unsuspecting Persians. The mayhem is hyperstylish and unburdened by deep thought or serious issues. Chief among the movie's indelible images is the nine-foot-tall Xerxes himself, who is carried into battle on a platform, complete with throne, by a detachment of Immortals--a particularly vicious breed of soldiers in eerie silver masks and black turbans. With his shaved chest and plucked brows, and his ornaments, bangles, and nose rings, Xerxes exudes a sexual prescence that's too deliriuosly campy to qualify as ambiguous, and he brings a giddy frisson to every scene he's in. Equally memorable is his monstrous executioner, a flesh-mountain of a man whose forearms have been honed into blades. And there's an extraordinary sequence in which Xerxes' invading fleet of ships is swallowed up by the sea, a high-tech advance in big-screen naval imagery. It's great that there's so much to watch in 300, because there's a lot to contemplate. The story seeks to make clear a single idea: that some things are worth not only fighting for but dying for; that selfless heroism is a core value of human civilization.