300

300 has one-dimensional caricatures who talk like professional wrestlers plugging their next feud.

Part of the fascination of the Thermopylae story is that it really happened, and it helped define real heroism. There's nothing remotely like reality to be had in this film.

It's impossible not to be moved by its nearly nonstop visual assault.

Keeping in mind Slate's Mickey Kaus' Hitler Rule -- never compare anything to Hitler -- it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a 300 screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again.

History is inconveniently complex. And so we get Frank Miller's version, in which everything is simplified to the point of porridge.

Watching 300, there's the arresting sense of eavesdropping on another time.

A muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film.

300 was as pathetically puerile as I had expected.

The kids just want to have fun. Many of them will. But what does that say about another Greek contribution -- Western civilization?

Filled from first frame to last with images that are meant to burn themselves into your memory and force you to tell your friends about what you just saw.

It is excessively, cheerfully violent -- and it is gorgeous to behold. It looks like the world's most sophisticated and expensive video game, and I mean that in a good way.

Snyder gives his movie the encompassing look and feel of a graphic novel. Perhaps because he shot the actors in front of digitally concocted backgrounds, Snyder is able to sustain an otherworldly quality that perfectly suits the movie's lurid material.

300 is about as violent as Apocalypto and twice as stupid.

[Gerard Butler's character] charisma is elusive. He vigorously enunciates like a summer stock player doing Shakespeare. But the writing's overblown. And locating the requisite sorrow in this tale of heroism is an afterthought for Snyder and co.

The heavily stylized compositions, balletic, blood-gushing violence, and wave after wave of different styles of marauders at times feel more like a video game than a movie.

300 is about as subtle as a spear through the head. But it's also shamelessly entertaining, and not a bad way to make time move a little faster.

For once, the Larry King quote machines who supply the advance blurbs to the studio for their marketing campaigns will be correct.

300, even with its impressive vistas of computer-generated soldiers, is just a throwaway epic.

Does the film stay faithful to the Miller and Varley's vision? Indeed it does -- to a kunch!

300 is a bruising, battering, visually resplendent caterwaul of an action-adventure, and I imagine the fighting men and women it celebrates probably wouldn't have had their story told any other way.