I am not even a little bit interested in following the lead of the whole rest of the internets, and discussing how the film version of Frank Miller's 300 does or does not endorse the cult of violent masculinity represented by George W. Bush and the neoconservatives. That would be giving the film entirely too much credit. I have a better reason for not making a political argument against 300: it's not good enough to deserve it. It's just a typical stupid action movie, with an extra dollop of stupid on the side.

The original comic miniseries was not, shall we say, a triumph of narrativity: 300 Spartans fight millions of Persians, and act all virile and honorable and hawk-ey. It was essentially a pretext for Frank Miller and Lynn Varley to create several extremely gorgeous tableaux, spreading across both pages of the open book (indeed, this was its gimmick, although insulting a sincere attempt to extend the limitations of comic art with the word "gimmick" is mean-spirited). It was a triumph of the graphic, not of the novel. And triumph is exactly the right word: you'd have to go pretty damn far to find a comic book with such a high page-to-gorgeous-image ratio.

Zack Snyder's adaptation is certainly aware of this, at least as far as he obviously wants to fill the movie up with striking imagery. And to that end, he uses the same greenscreen technology with computer-generated sets and backgrounds that brought another Frank Miller book to life in Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. He does not use it as well.

Before seeing the film, I wondered if I'd be able to keep thoughts of Sin City out of my head; having seen it, I have a very hard time comparing them at all. While the earlier film used CGI to create a heavily stylized world with heavily stylized lighting, 300 looks essentially realistic, although like reality coated in the world's ugliest shade of copper. This is extremely bad, because much like Rodriguez, Snyder has largely seen fit to leave Miller's dialogue and characters untouched, and these are not remotely realistic. It was the chief victory of Sin City, perhaps, that the extremely heightened reality of the visuals was so complete as to actually make the wildly over-boiled dialogue not just acceptable but necessary. That film was a complete hyper-stylized whole. In 300, with weaker actors and much less interesting visuals, the dialogue comes off as badly as anything you ever did hear, not so much the parody of old-time epics it could/should have been, and more like listening to eight-year-olds on a sugar high playing "Spartacus."

This is a film that basically lives and dies on its visuals, and it knows that, and the visuals suck. Sorry for the briefly non-professional moment there. No, I'm not. Because the visuals suck. The are some very good shots stolen baldly from the graphic novel, which I'm honestly okay with, but mostly this is just one poorly-framed moment after another, with all of the BIG EPIC MOMENTS looking rather shockingly like actors staring at a flat wall where blatant CGI thingies were composited in later. Movies are 2-D, of course, that is their dark secret, but the best ones don't seem to be. 300 is flat, as flat as any contemporary movie I've ever seen. I'm not going to get into...okay, so I'm almost positive the reason why is because the actors were being lit and shot on a tiny greenscreen stage with more attention paid to getting them exposed properly than to the actual shape of the lighting. Another point for Sin City, which took its cues from film noir and had some of the harshest, highest-contrast lighting of any recent movie. (Another reason for the flatness is that the transition from digital video to film resulted in a simply unbearable amount of visual noise; but that might have just been my print).

Worst of all, for an action movie, 300 is pretty inert. There is such formal rigidness to Snyder's adaptation of the extremely kinetic comic that it feels more like Noh theater than a motion picture. The most egregious example of this is the constant reliance on slow-motion to stress moments of "excitement," usually just before the moment when the fake-looking CGI blood spurts out of the now-dead body. But it's more general than that: the whole film feels like an endless series of still images, and this is more or less the opposite of "action."

300 is frankly dull, and that is not something I would have ever predicted possible. But it is: dull images, dull movement. The sound design, I suppose, is not dull, but this is largely at the cost of it being shrill and grating.

Zack Snyder's only previous feature was the remake of Dawn of the Dead, which was rather surprisingly good, and successful in all the ways that 300 is not: fast-paced, full of recognizable human beings, littered with really effective setpieces and scare moments, and well-realized visually. So I hate to lay all the blame for this film on his feet; but there's nowhere else to lay it. This is a terribly directed film, slow and plodding and not nearly imaginative enough, and of course it's already become a rousing success. Nobody ever lost money betting on the tastelessness of the American public.