When the critics bash the film 300, I can't help noticing they also can't resist the temptation to bash anyone who actually enjoys it.

The ironically right-wing, Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post tells us that the boys who liked this film would really fit in well with the Hitler Youth. It is when you find yourself being called a Nazi by the Its Unpatriotic To Criticize the War crowd that you know you're on someone's sore point.

I went delving through film reviews of 300 and found a lot of evaluations based upon what the film isn't and very few that attempted to grapple with what it actually is.

The first thing that strikes critics as 'appalling' is the film's apparent 'glorification of violence'. I'll return to this in a moment but first I have to observe that the largest problem critics have to face here is that they are, from the very beginning of the film, rendered totally uncertain as to the identity of the good guys.

Hollywood has drenched us with such utter shit these past few decades that film critics get really spooked whenever presented with cause to suspect the moral superiority of the 'heroes'. You know they'd be able to cope better if they weren't immediately informed that Spartans throw deformed babies into pits.

They could also cope better (or at least, manifest more palpable hypocrisy) if they could connect the heroes of this film to their own culture. After all, everybody knows that a violent and gore-filled film can be respectable only if it celebrates the patriotism of US troops in any theater of the Second World War.

So the hazy morality of a people who discard deformed babies and engage in child abuse somehow removes the imaginary 'white hats' from the heads of the Spartans. How very, very uncomfortable for film critics.

Without an obvious good guy/bad guy, critics began to flounder. Their next obstacle was the film's politics. Let's get this out of the way once and for all.

300 has no politics.

At least, none worth yapping about - critics looking for allegory should look elsewhere (like, hmm, Harry Potter? Go mad, you crazy kids! Lot's of politics there...)
In 300 there is no commentary on the Spartan attitude toward Athenian democracy, no soliloquys on totalitarianism. The Spartans only care about fighting well - politics and politicians are clearly the domain of old men, diseased inbreds, or the despicably corrupt.

Yet critics have made these political comparisons, sometimes comparing Spartans to US troops in Baghdad - other times the Persian Empire. It's somewhat amusing. It makes one feel like saying 'not everything is about you, guys. This film is about Spartans, because they were interesting and weird. Get over the 'not about you' part' and you'll begin to get this film.

Then CNN comes along and describes this film as "out-of-step with these war-weary times."

Living in the United States, this made me pause to consider when it was the last time I met someone who was actually war weary. This Iraq War is insidiously invisible to 99 percent of Americans. But if you define war weary as 'American news consumers sick and tired of hearing about Iraq and who instead want to hear about Britney's shaved [insert this week's body-part]' then sure, this country is definitely war weary. We can all go along and pretend that most of us are weary from first-hand knowledge of fighting, death and personal sacrifice. We've all watched MASH - war is hell,

Everyone who lives overseas at least already realises that Americans have a bit of a crush on fascism nowadays. Totalitarian regimes were the norm in this world until fairly recently. It is a bit hard to make any historical film without having to put it right down into a political milieu that features a king, emperor or autocrat.

So what makes this film so right-wing? Why wasn't Lord of the Rings considered an apology for feudalism? Because clearly 300 is so different from the run-of-the-mill Hollywood films, that it's a bit of an assault on the nerves for your average film critic (and most of them, let's face it, are particularly average). Film critics, like all of us, get used to seeing the same damn film over and over again. One can imagine how a film like 300 can be a bit of a challenge to the unwary.

300 is better understood as an expensive art-house project and not your usual genre piece starring Gwyneth or Brad. Critics have tried to twist its story into some kind of contemporary allegory and failed.

The subject of the movie, as well as the graphic novel on which it is based, is set in the strange and surreal austerity that was life in ancient Sparta. These pieces of art concern the curiously 'other-worldly' nature of the Greek's concept of heroism. There is something timeless about that theme: what feats can men and women rise to under the very direst of circumstances? 300 is merely a loosely historical tale about a masochistic society that devoted themselves to that ideal.

But Frank Miller's musings on the savage Spartan ideal of heroism is more fascination than actual recommendation. Artists do not do well in such societies, and Frank Miller is clearly enough of a genius to have noted this.

I didn't detect anything in this film or graphic novel that recommended Spartan culture to modern audiences. Nor does the film espouse misogyny, gay-bashing, throwing deformed babies into pits or using elephants in Iraq against the insurgents.

But it is difficult for an artist, laboring on his or her art, to prevent their art from becoming some kind of celebration of its subject matter. 300 is so well done, and so immerses itself in the spirit of its subject that the film cannot help celebrating violence. The problem is this: why, after all these years, is 300 an 'awful celebration of violence and war'? After all the horribly bad and exploitive Vietnam films - and the slew of ridiculous Iraq films that lay ahead of us - what is so strange about 300?

The answer, I think, as well as what is so unnerving about 300 in general, is that the film is simply extremely good and enjoyable. It is an uneasy pleasure for any civilized film critic who has read a history book or two.

300 is like like a stage play or ballet of sublimated violence. Above all it is an ode to an ancient ideal of heroism. There is no backdrop of an American flag to sanitize the fighting, which is what is so unsettling about the cartoonish violence in the film.

Unfortunately most critics can do nothing but gloat over how homo-erotic the entire film winds up being. This is significant, we assume, because the film's target audience is supposed to be young heterosexual men (see if you can find a review that isn't condescending toward them because I couldn't). I have to admit, however, that 300's spectacle of homosexual eroticism is something I failed to notice. I suppose having grown up in the hot climates of sub-tropical Australia I am unhealthily familiar with the sight of men going about bare-chested. I'll try to remember to leer salaciously when I watch 300 next time on DVD. Not that there is anything wrong with the film's alleged homo-eroticism, of course; they mention it merely to be complimentary.

I did notice, however, that the CGI backdrops are deliberately washed out and the Spartan hillsides are often out of focus. I believe that these effects are deliberate and not a sign of sloppiness or thrift on behalf of the production company.

By contrast, the scarlet cloaks of the Spartan warriors are rich and vibrant. Perhaps the use of technology in this film isn't to draw attention off to a distracting background like so many other CGI-enhanced films, but to direct attention to the foreground where the human drama plays out. This is a dream world, after all, with a roving focus that switches back and forth. Time speeds up and slows down to great effect. I can't remember the last time film-makers paid such exquisite attention to visual detail.

In some ways 300 is really just a CGI-augmented play, which is incidentally what we wrongly believe most films are supposed to be. But 300 is a Greek sort of play, with Greek themes and interests. Critics have responded to this play, however, by pointing out that the backdrop looks totally fake.

"Thermopylae doesn't look remotely like Greece," writes Tom Charity of CNN, "it looks more like the inside of a computer game."

And this unreal sumptuousness of a computer game graphics is, we gather, a bad thing. The "morphs between live actors and a graphic animated world" - whatever that means - "is both cheaper and more malleable than the usual movie sets," Charity writes. This is contrasted to Ridley Scott dragging production crews around four countries during the shooting of Gladiator. "Photo-realism is dead, or at least on its way out," he adds.

A film that is adapted from a graphic novel takes liberties with photographic realism. Beware! Doom approaches! And yet I don't recall the last time I was in a cinema when the audience applauded as the credits rolled.

Only one reviewer seems to recognize that 300's bombast and intensity isn't representative of a failing on the directors part. "In a strange way, it may require these broad strokes to roughly convey the extremes of ancient history. The Spartans, martial in every facet of their lives, seemed strange even to other Greeks..."

The Spartans, one might say, were a weird bunch of cats. This film is unsettling, at times beautiful and provocative, at others simply unnerving and dark. It is nonetheless intensely enjoyable. If that is a problem for critics - if the high levels of violence are unaccompanied by the correct flag, cause or nationality, then that is a problem elsewhere.

I don't really believe we are encouraged to be violent in Western society, but we seem to be expected to be great hypocrites. You only need to read the New York Post occasionally to get a sense of that; I recommend it for its sheer entertainment value.

Just don't bother with their film reviews.