... this one includes some comments from Victor Davis Hanson ... from the Philly Inquirer:

Based on Frank Miller's graphic novel, 300 is a gorgeous, ultraviolent take on the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BC. In that savage battle, Sparta's King Leonidas and 300 soldiers (buttressed by 700 volunteers) sacrifice themselves to hold off hundreds of thousands in Persia's invading army for three days - in the process killing 20,000 of the enemy.

Much like Robert Rodriguez's 2005 adaptation of Miller's black-and-white masterpiece, Sin City, the full-color 300 has been translated by director Zack Snyder into a visual feast. Less a movie than a trippy blitz on the senses, 300 is an Xtreme movie, an extravaganza of colors, bodies, weapons and blood (and blood, and blood), propelled by a turbocharged guitar score.

But even if 300 is a formal triumph, its unabashed celebration of Sparta's violent, war-obsessed culture raises questions about its message in America's time of war: Is it an endorsement or a critique?

Miller's Leonidas is a king whose passion to defend Greece against Persia leads him to break international treaties and defy his own Council of Elders (bloggers have pointed to this as a caricaturish version of President Bush's defiance of the international community) in the rush to war.

The king is convinced that war is the only way to defend Sparta - a haven of freedom and rational thinking - against submission to the Persians, whom he describes as barbaric and superstitious and who are depicted as dark-skinned, ugly and deformed. By comparison the Spartans, flawless examples of white male beauty, have perfect abs and comely faces, and even get to fight topless.

The story develops through a series of episodes, each in a different color scheme and boasting different uses of light. A love scene, for instance, evokes the hyper-real texture of human skin in a Lucian Freud oil.

Each builds toward a visual crescendo. "The film is the opera of the battle, more than anything," said Snyder.

The fighting starts 45 minutes into the film and never ceases, as wave after wave of (progressively uglier) Persians walk into Sparta's trap, a narrow mountain gorge, for the rest of the 117 minutes.

What is most disturbing about the violence here is how awfully pretty it is - so pretty that it hides the ugly truth about war.

Some may object to how 300 presents war as some grand Wagnerian spectacle, divorced from moral judgment. But Snyder said it's more complicated than that.

"I'm telling a mythological take on the battle from inside Spartan culture," he said. "And from that point of view... their war is noble."

And Snyder insists certain scenes are so outrageous that they alert viewers that the movie may not share Spartan values. "At one point, you see Leonidas casually eating an apple while his men finish off the wounded," he said. "That's absurd! Such an obvious clue" that our morals clash with theirs.

Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and classics scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said it's not so easy to judge 300 from a contemporary perspective. He said Miller's story simply adopts the partisan point of view that Greek writer Herodotus and other home-team historians had about the Spartans, who were lauded as champions of Western freedom.

"From their point of view, they are fighting to uphold freedom from subservience to Persia, who had no concept of individual liberty," Hanson said.

Hanson, who wrote the introductory essay to the book 300: The Art of the Film, said 300 was intended to present an "impressionistic," yet accurate, sense of Spartan attitudes. "The film may be controversial in today's multicultural world," he said, but it "simply was not intended to make a political statement."

But is authorial intent the last word in how a story or movie communicates a message? After all, the war issue is very much alive, even though Miller, who has begged off numerous interview requests due to a busy schedule, wrote 300 in 1998, years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or the Iraq invasion.

To complicate matters, consider that in an interview on National Public Radio in January, Miller echoed much of what Leonidas says in the movie about the clash between West and East: "It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western world is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants."

Miller said he had no problem judging American culture to be superior to Islamic extremism. "Let's finally talk about the enemy," he said. "Nobody seems to be talking about who we're up against, and the sixth-century barbarism they actually represent. These people saw people's heads off... . They do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us."

Do his views on extremism make any difference in how the movie should be received? As some literary theorists argue, a text (or movie) such as 300 gains its significance through the ongoing conversations we have about it, and not the author's intent. How else could Shakespeare's Hamlet - or Tom Sawyer - still have such power and meaning if it did not speak as well to our time as to its own?

Snyder echoes the point - in so many words:

"As long as the movie can make people conscious and... open up debate, that's the most I can ask for."

Elsewhere, in the Star:

Greek critics have blasted "300," a Hollywood recreation of the 480 BC Battle of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas of Sparta held back a massive Persian military invasion, leading to its eventual defeat.

The movie – an adaptation of artist Frank Miller's graphic novel – opens in Greece on Friday and will show at 70 screens in greater Athens.

The popular Athinorama magazine described the film as a ``bloodlust videogame."

Daily Ta Nea newspaper gave Zack Snyder's "300" zero out of 10, with critic Dimitris Danikas claiming the film even carried a message about the U.S. war on terror.

"By ancient Persia, they refer to modern Iran – whose soldiers are portrayed as bloodthirsty, underdeveloped zombies," he wrote. ``They are stroking racist instincts in Europe and America."

Robby Eksiel at the daily Ethnos said moviegoers would be dazzled by the "digital action" but irritated by the "pompous interpretations and one-dimensional characters."

Greece's critics were similarly scathing about other recent movies depicting ancient battles, including Wolfgang Petersen's ``Troy" and Oliver Stone's "Alexander" in 2004.

It's a pattern that disappointed Panayiotis Timoyiannakis, the lone voice of support among Greek critics for "300"

"This is not a university lecture, it's a movie," he wrote in the daily Eleftheros Typos. "It's an adaptation of a comic to the big screen, and that's only how it should be judged . . . When seen this way, it gets high marks."

So I guess we're seeing the marketing ploy which Mel Gibson cashed in on so well with ... ensure that the press gets the opinion of a group potentially offended by the movie and hit the wire services with it. I'm sure we'll shortly we seeing some comments about the 'bizarre' depiction of Xerxes and the Persians.

FWIW, I went to Indigo yesterday (a Canadian equivalent to Borders, but with a Starbucks inside) and intended on purchasing the graphic novel version ... I was rather disappointed at how visually dull it was compared to others in the genre. The commercials for the movie look much more interesting.