Every drop of blood gets its own close-up in 300, the stylized war drama inspired by Frank Miller’s (Sin City) graphic novel account of the battle of Thermopylae. Directed by Zach Snyder, 300 has a high-contrast, saturated color palette of golds and reds. The battle scenes use the “bullet-time” of the Matrix movies and the freakish villains and bloody hand-to-hand fighting of the Lord of the Rings movies. But instead of bullets pausing in mid-flight to let agents avoid them, here it is splashes of blood from severed limbs. The effect makes watching the movie reminiscent of reading a graphic novel or comic book, where dramatic images are frozen, albeit briefly, on the screen. Visually, the movie becomes a series of artistically rendered images, like the frames of a comic book. Only these are animated images, with sound, and projected on the big screen. Enough of these images are visually striking enough to make the movie worth watching as a sort of visual picture book, regardless of how engaging one finds the storytelling.

Part of the modern appeal of the story, at least in America, must be how clear-cut and strategically simple were the terms of the war between the Greeks and the Persian army of Xerxes I in contrast to the so-called war the United States currently finds itself fighting. In 300 the bad guys are all gathered together in an endless sea of grotesque, murderous slave-soldiers who come at the good guys (300 Spartans and 700 Thespians (they only act like soldiers)) in a nice organized progression with the intent of killing all the men and enslaving all the women and children of Greece. If only al Qaeda would line up all together like that.

Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas of Sparta, a kingdom where all the men have hairless Bowflex torsos and the boys start training to be soldiers as soon as they can walk. The women of Sparta feel special because they give birth to such awesome fighters. As the group of 300 elite fighters heads off to delay the advancing Persian army, a voice over informs us that there is no place in Sparta for softness. This makes it sound like an interesting place to visit, like Mount Everest, but not particularly homey. His Queen, played by Lena Headey, tries to convince the recalcitrant city council to commit the full Spartan army, but the film is all about the battle at a narrow pass where the valiant and buff 300 of Sparta kill thousands of scary but inept Persians. Occasionally Xerxes, portrayed by Rodrigo Santoro as an 8-foot androgynous demigod, shows up to try to convince Leonidas to stop the fighting and become a big shot general in Xerxes’ army. Leonidas refuses, of course, on the grounds that Xerxes is creepy and has an unpronounceable name. And also that he is fighting for freedom – a sort of model of democracy in the middle east. Okay, I’m being flippant, but the movie is so over the top that it’s hard not to poke a little fun at it. Nevertheless, the visuals are excellent, and the underlying historical events are compelling.