300: Critic Reviews

300 explodes off the screen in IMAX. It is the only way to see this epic picture.

This is dazzle for the head, not the heart.

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

Apart from anything else, the idea of America having the Spartans' underdog status is not plausible.

The battle sequences are filled with grotesque spectacle: They start off entertainingly ferocious, then grow numbing with stylized spraying blood and severed heads.

It's kind of a ghastly hoot, and while I suppose it does no harm, it also contributes nothing. It's a guilty unpleasantness.

There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.

Frankly, it's the slavish, frame-by-frame devotion to Miller's source material that's the problem. That explains both the risible screenplay and why the movie, for all its liberation from the real world, never takes full-winged flight.

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

It also pits millions of fans of brainless violence against a gallant band, or so I choose to think of us, who still expect movies to contain detectable traces of humanity.

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

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.

[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.

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

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

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.

The movie should've been called Ode to a Grecian Ab.

The disconnect between the human actors and the digital backgrounds is more pronounced here... Because classic Hollywood cinema is so rich with epic images of antiquity, this can't help but seem chintzy.

300 is one breathtaking digi-tableau after another. But the dialogue is a joke, the performances have more to do with bodybuilding than character, and the lesson that the film imparts isn't anything to do with courage and military skill.

It is a wall-to-wall canvas of expressionist ultraviolence.

It is undeniably exciting and awe-inspiring; but it also lacks a sense of tactile warmth, a crucial core of reality.

In creating the ultimate movie for sword-and-sandal blood-spatter fetishists, director Zack Snyder scores on the spectacle side -- 300 looks amazing -- but his mechanical story line and over-the-top melodramatics don't support the action.

300 was as pathetically puerile as I had expected.

A blustery, bombastic, visually arresting account of the Battle of Thermopylae as channeled through the rabid imagination of graphic novelist Frank Miller.

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.