Wait. What? You mean if someone gets shot by a 12 gauge they don't go flying through the air 2 feet up and 10 feet back? Say it ain't so!
It's really difficult to watch a movie supposedly (implicitly?) based on historic events if the screenwriter takes literary license to play fast and loose with the details to make it more...cinematic. Which they certainly are allowed to do. Kind of in their job description.
Same issue I had with 300. 'Course, that was based on a graphic novel, so it ended up being distilled twice from what we know of the history. Forget the 10-foot-tall Xerxes and the Persians' elephants and rhinos. If the fictional rendering is blatantly outlandish enough, it's often easier to suspend disbelief. But other stuff is harder to ignore, things like the movie indicating that the Spartans were the only Greeks at Thermopylae, or that Spartans fought with no body armor. Or that Sparta arose alone to fight Persia...Athens and Eretria actually started the mess when they sent ships and men to fight against Darius I on the side of the rebelling Ionians in Asia Minor, and that resulted in the razing and burning of the Persian city, Sardis.
Darius retaliated with Persia's first incursion into Greece and the burning of Eretria. But the Persians were defeated and repulsed--remember the Battle of Marathon? So Darius I's son Xerxes decided to return and finish the job, because they perceived the Greeks to be a clear and present danger to their western border. Most historians don't think it was territorial expansion on the part of the Persians at all (the Persian empire at the time was bordered on the west by Thrace...and the Aegean Sea; they had never jumped across a major body of water in a land-grab previously, so it wouldn't have made sense to try to subjugate Athens and Sparta without controlling first Macedon and then probably Thessaly and Epirus). And it was after Xerxes started marching to jab Athens in the eye with a sharp stick that the Athenians then came to Leonidas asking for Sparta's help in defense against the Persians.
Wow. I really took this on a track away from the cool photo of the "Elysian Fields." Sorry 'bout that.