'300' is a movie that tries very hard to paint the history behind the Battle of Thermopylae as a clear-cut conflict between the evil, mutant forces of Persia and the noble, rippling heroes of ancient Sparta. To that end, director/co-scripter Zack Snyder deploys a literal arsenal of cinematic razzle-dazzle onto the screen, as well as a generous dollop of war movie cliches and histrionic melodrama. The final result, as might be expected, is a film that may be visually exciting, but plays out as a shallow, crass exercise in audience manipulation.

Destined to be over-praised by those who are stunned (literally stunned... halfway through the movie a guy sitting a few seats down from me in the theater had a seizure and passed out) into submission by the slick fight choreography and Snyder's impressive attention to visual detail, '300' charges at you like a CG rhino in full battle regalia, and it's ultimately as artificial as one too. Where other, better war films take the time to flesh out the context between the opposing sides, '300' can't seem to offer much more than grotesque villains who are motivated purely by degenerate greed, heroes who are so righteous they practically sweat honor out of their heaving pectorals, and repetitive bluescreen-enhanced battle sequences punctuated by manly-man grunts and flying ejaculations of arterial blood.

It's a beautiful film to look at, but it's also an ugly one too, rife as it is with nasty stereotypes of literally monstrous brown-skinned bad guys who nail innocent villagers to trees for fun (and presumably chow down on doe-eyed babies while they're at it). '300' also takes more than a few pot-shots at gays, depicting many of the villains as androgynous and/or effeminate... for example, the evil Persian king Xerxes, with his arched, pencil-thin eyebrows and layers of candy-ass jewelry, resembles nothing so much as the love child of the Rock and Elizabeth Taylor. (Just to hammer the point home even further, Xerxes stocks his private pleasure tent with gyrating transvestites and also tries to give the Spartan king a back rub at one point.) None of that creepy faggotry for the virile Spartans, of course - when they're not engaged in manly bouts of torturing their children (in a kind and paternal way, of course... nothing helps a young boy grow up big and strong like a daily caning), they're busy watching their wives' bosoms bounce around in slow motion as they make hetero, hetero love.

In fact, for a movie this homophobic, there's an odd, even disturbing eroticism to the violence of the battle scenes. Maybe it's the way the Spartans keep giving each other knowing smirks while they dodge flying body parts and squirts of blood, or maybe its just the leather thongs, shiny spears and bronzed nipples on display, but there's something about '300' that feels like gay porn with the sex simply replaced by thrusting weaponry and pierced flesh. The groans sound the same, really, and in the end, when fallen Spartan he-men lay side by side, grinning with heroic satisfaction at a job well-done as they bleed out into the dirt, you can't help but expect them to spoon up and light a post-coital cigarette.

Much speechifying is inserted in between the battle scenes, most of it about freedom and the need for real men to defend their country, wives, and children from the forces of evil. This would ring a bit truer if the film didn't establish right from the beginning that the Spartans themselves practiced the wholesale murder of their own children (babies born with 'inferior' defects were chucked off a cliff) and kept slaves. That '300' remains blissfully unaware of these ironic contradictions while it chugs full-bore ahead in its drive to eulogize the Spartans as noble, freedom-obsessed proto-Americans simply underscores why it ultimately rings so false as both drama and history lesson. In the end, its only real plus is its fight choreography, and that's simply not enough to make it a good movie.