300

Director Zack Snyder and co-writers Kurt Johnstad and Michael B. Gordon adapt the Frank Miller-Lynn Varley “graphic novel” about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., when a handful of Greek warriors held off the million-plus army of Xerxes of Persia long enough for the rest of Greece to quit squabbling and get serious about repelling the invader. The largely CGI movie has Miller’s visual style, all right, and it often soars over-the-top with some truly oddball conceits (for example, a Xerxes who looks like a metal-studded Grace Jones in butch drag, and Spartan warriors who sound like bellowing drunken Scottish soccer fans). But it follows the general outline of history as well as most historical epics, with some rousing battles and an aura of the misty, unreachable past that few movies can even hint at.