300 (15)

Talk about a guilty pleasure. I thoroughly enjoyed the sword-and-sandal epic 300 - found it quite magnificent, exhilarating even. But I realise that probably means I have all the aesthetic and ideological discernment of a Norwegian death-metal fan. 300 rocks! - and I pray to Zeus no one quotes me on that - but it rocks in a way I can't begin to approve of.

Purportedly a depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, Zack Snyder's film is based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, itself inspired by the 1962 Hollywood epic The 300 Spartans. It's the story of Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler), who leads 300 intrepid warriors to face the multitudinous armies of Persian ruler Xerxes at Thermopylae, here called the "Hot Gates": consider it the classical world's OK Corral. The smattering of sub-plot is barely important: what matters is that sinews are hardened, loins girded, and blood spilled in gushes of digi-gore that dissolve like fireworks in mid-air. Snyder, who directed the zombie remake Dawn of the Dead, uses every post-Matrix trick of speeding up and slowing down action to make the battle scenes intense and immersive. Violence has rarely been so deliriously aestheticised. Snyder goes full-out with CGI's capacity to turn actors' bodies into manipulable objects: soldiers have their heads sliced off in mid-dash. One Spartan youth, thus decapitated, keels over like a felled statue; it's a horrifying image, yet hypnotically graceful.

Sin City, Frank Miller's neo-noir collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, set a benchmark for digital artifice, and 300 comes close; where that film brought live-action cinema closer to drawing, 300 merges cinema and brass rubbing. The images seem etched in silver and bronze. Snyder and his art department draw on classical models and Victorian academic neoclassicism: a courtyard of figures freeze in a tableau under falling snow; when the Spartans drive their foes over a cliff, we see it side on, as if in a frieze.

This is a strikingly inhuman film, its actors reduced to living statuary. In fact, 300's digital spectacle is often less startling than the thought of what Snyder has done with flesh-and-blood actors such as Butler and David Wenham, who must have endured intense forced labour in the gym to end up such ludicrously buffed, centaur-like men. The Spartans are less a war party than a muscle beach party, arriving for battle in skimpy trunks and capes, looking like the Fire Island wing of the WWF. Lest we get the wrong idea, we also see Leonidas enjoying brisk marital sex with his queen, Gorgo (Lena Headey), although you're reminded of what wags said in 1949 about Victor Mature in his finest Biblical hour, namely that Samson had bigger tits than Delilah. Camper still is Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), an oiled, kohled, elaborately pierced vision, carried aloft on a silver dais that wouldn't have looked amiss beneath Grace Jones.

You're thinking that 300 sounds like a rare old romp - but it's not. The film is made in deadly, sombre earnest, beginning with its exposition of Spartan education: we see the young Leonidas in warrior school, where pubescent boys batter each other to the bone, Raging Bull style. This rhetoric of hard-forged will is then amplified by images of sunlit cornfields, in which stand the flower of Spartan womanhood and youth. With what I only hope is glib cynicism, Snyder is recycling the Hitlerian iconography of warriorship and Fatherland. Probably the Nazi-est movie Hollywood has ever made, 300 is what Leni Riefenstahl might have come up with, given the CGI budget.

Just as questionable is the film's apocalyptic clash between West and East, in which Sparta, "the world's one hope", stands against the Axis of Evil ("the armies of all Asia"). Xerxes's infernal ranks - headed by leering generals wearing the most dubious Asian headgear since Kismet - include elephants, rhinos, masked ninjas, and a mutant with lobster-claw hands. Off-duty, Xerxes presides over a tacky Orientalist nightmare of highly spiced perviness, complete with lesbian floorshow, mutilations optional. Not surprisingly, the Iranian government has condemned the film - which has already taken $96m in the US - as "cultural and psychological warfare" and a misrepresentation of history. But substitute the word "Klingon" or "Orc" for "Persian", and you can see that 300 never remotely makes any serious claim to depict the real Xerxes.

300 may have been conceived as a PlayStation-style pretext for delirious combat, but its mock-classical glorification of war is wildly irresponsible, given the abject conflict in which Western forces are currently engaged in the Middle East. You hate to imagine what sort of morale- and testosterone-boosting kick US troops in Iraq might even now be deriving from bootleg DVDs of the film.

It's a moot point whether 300 is a genuine contemporary expression of bellicose fervour, or simply an image-making exercise that sees war as the apogee of pure style. What fascinates, horrifies and - I confess - exhilarates me about 300 is its will to extremity. The film courts ridicule with every image, every line - "Only the hard and strong may call themselves Spartans! Only the hard! Only the strong!" Yet we're never invited to snigger, but to admire the film's absolute belief in itself. In other words, 300 far transcends the prevalent attitude to kitsch as a facile, off-the-peg effect. The seriousness and passion - even, at moments, the genius - of Snyder's film-making makes 300's kitsch authentic, and thus a mesmerising rarity. 300 is a repellent film and a stupid one, but it's also magnificent, and I rather wish it weren't.

j.romney@independent.co.uk