film | Army fatigue

Exactly how homosexual is 300, a fantastical — but hardly fantastic — bit of revisionist history focusing on the small Spartan army that managed to temporarily stave off an impossibly mighty battalion of Persian invaders in what any enthusiastic ancient studies teacher would probably gush was the awesomest last stand, like, ever? It's so homosexual that the nonstop sequences of half-naked musclemen grunting as they jab each other with phallic implements are nearly stud-on-stud porn with a more bombastic soundtrack. It's so homosexual that, when Spartan soldiers run a Persian flank off the edge of a steep cliff, I expected the Weathergirls' "it's raining men" to suddenly kick in on the Dolby. It's so homosexual that it could be subtitled A Gay Romp with Leonidas and Xerxes at Thermopylae.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

But 300 must think that there is something wrong with that, because its homoerotic subtext is matched only by its homophobic one. The movie is essentially an all-you-can-eye buffet of swarthy Spartan soldiers flaunting and flexing their chisled hardbodies, but for all its read-between-the-lines beefcake posturing, 300 seems decidedly skittish about being viewed as anything other than an ode to hetero manliness, a ¿quién es más macho? stomp around the battlefield. When the Spartan king Leonidas (his royal ripped-ness Gerard Butler of The Phantom of the Opera) slams his Persian foes as "boy-lovers" — right, because same-sex pederasty was never the thing to do in 480 BC Sparta — it's a queasy moment, but when 300 finally shows this evil Persian threat, the hoo-rah bigotry segues into laughable camp. It turns out Persia boasts less of a military than a marching circuit party; in between skirmishes, they enjoy elaborate orgies — don't worry, dudes, cuz the camera only lingers over the lesbo stuff — and their ruler, the self-professed god Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, newly of television's Lost), is realized as a towering drag-queen priss in gold body jewelry and about seven layers of Max Factor. Yeah, Sparta! we're meant to cheer. Kick their boy-lovin', accessorizin', alternative-lifestyle-havin' asses! Hurry, before they kidnap you at spearpoint and drag you to a Cher concert!

Seekers of the thrill-ride viewing experience might not mind the garishly confused overtones, because 300 contains a proper smattering of visceral excesses, chiefly the striking monochromatic compositions that director Zack Snyder (2004's Dawn of the Dead redux) and cinematographer Larry Fong (also from Lost) lift straight from Frank Miller's graphic-novel source. As in 2005's adaptation of Miller's Sin City, however, razzle-dazzle can only carry an empty stylistic exercise so far, and less than a half-hour in, the visual punch becomes more of a nagging flick on the earlobe. You'd think the story of Sparta's David fending off Persia's Goliath would loan itself to a rousing combat epic, but Snyder is so obsessed with parlaying the cool factor that he shoots the bloody bits up close and personal — great for a clear view of the graphic slow-motion carnage, but it hampers the bigger picture. I dunno how the real Spartans managed to really defeat the real Persians without the assist from today's finest green-screen craftsmen.

Yeah, yeah, I get it: The Spartans didn't actually overpower martial-artist acrobats and a marauding menagerie of elephants and rhinos. These parts offer a tenuous link to historical accuracy; it's more a depiction of their triumph as word-of-mouth mythos probably spun it. (And 300 is narrated, in fact, in tall-tale pronouncements that obnoxiously states the obvious: "The wolf begins to circle the boy.") But even as a visionary history-class goregasm, 300 flounders, too redundant in its spurting ultra-violence, its bellowed declarations ("THIS! IS! SPARTA!"), its heavily digitized comic-book artifice to be much in the way of escapist entertainment. Strip the film of rampant sexual insinuation, initial ooohs and ahhhs, and quite possibly the finest parade of male abdominal ripples ever to grace the screen, and Edwin Starr was right: War is good for absolutely nothing. C-