Speedos, pustules, and buckets of blood. It's called a Graphic Novel. We used to call them Comic Books

Initially Zack Snyder's 300, based like Rodriguez's violent, ugly, macho Sin City on a Frank Miller graphic novel, certainly has a distinctively derivative look. That is to say, it captures perhaps better than anyone before (despite so many movies made from comic books) the Frank Frazetta comic illustrator style. It's a kind of adolescent boy's dream world, austere, romantic, angular like all comic book images (but doesn't that come from Forties Hollywood?), in dread of the ultimate teenage ugliness, acne (evidenced in gross skin eruptions) and full of perfect, acne-free super males dressed in Speedos and capes to show off their excessively defined abs and pecs. Miller's and Snyder's Spartans go into battle against the Persians at Thermopolae wearing almost nothing but their buffed-up muscles, which are the one thing the movie is ultimately about. This is a bit ironic, since they are very into using their round shields effectively. You'd think they'd consider some armor, but that would cut off our view of the abs and pecs. They wear helmets, but those are mainly an S/M style statement.

The Persians, in stark contrast this season, are very wrapped up, sort of like desert Arabs, and their leaders are very into elaborate, peculiar, one-of-a-kind piercings (quite the rage among exotic movie bad guys these days). They also seem a perverse outgrowth of the Spartan's rejection of all abnormalities, which the Persian's use of legendary horned beasts and elephants and deformed human giants, are a contrasting embrace of. Notably, a grotesque hunchback on the Spartan side isn't allowed to fight and goes over to the Persians, where he's welcomed by the giant metro-sexual Persian leader Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who wears not only piercings and chains but lipstick, fingernail polish, and painted-on eyebrows. But the Spartans too have a crew of elders they go to for advice, whose faces and bodies are covered with pustules. (They're a teenager's nightmare of old age.) The imagination here oscillates between idealized male (and very rarely female) perfection and disgust at everything and everyone else.

The thinking behind this movie doesn't seem consistent. If the Persians are gay, how come it's the Spartans who go around in bulging Speedos? Whether you're gay or straight, you wouldn't really want to be on either side. And after a while despite or perhaps because of the highly stylized way the battle sequences are cranked out with slow-mo starts and stops and pauses for spurting blood, the color-drained images of the uniformly buff male bodies and Frazetta landscapes, which seem made of brushstrokes rather than dirt and stone, start to seen monotonous and repetitive. Surely any viewer who's seen Kurosawa's samurai battles, or more recently Clint Eastwood's realistic Iwo Jima footage, is likely to find this movie lacking in real action interest. It would be interesting to see an attempt to recreate the battle from history books instead of a picture book for adolescent grownups. As an antidote to this glorification of fake heroism, go and see Bruno Dumont's Flanders when it comes out in the US.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.