I’ve been shamed by Greg Storey. Oh, I don’t know Greg personally. And he doesn’t know me. But last month, I was reading a post of his and was confronted by my own delinquency. I had known what I should do, and I had even known when. Heck, I had even tried to do it, but I lost sight of my goals and let things slide. It took a stranger’s account of that glorious moment, that laying bare of the state of things, to remind me that I forgot to order my copy of FontBook.

I’m happy to say that I once was lost, but now I’m found.

Frank Miller’s 300, the comic, is a gorgeous fictionalized retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae. It is a hyper-epic, in the way that Sin City is a hyper-noir. The battles are visual essays on unrelenting force, the grace and power of a body forged to fight with weapons deriving their energy from human motion, and the waves of absolute oppression crashing against the rocks of self-determination. It is a stylized homage not to the specific ideologies of the Spartans, but to their truly staggering will and strength, obtained through a cultural dynamic of constant, brutal testing of the self. To read 300 is to marvel at the possibilities contained within humanity, to witness the raw harshness of human existence forge societies and soldiers of unparalleled might. 300 is an ode the magnificence of human spectacle, as manifested by the players on the stage of the Battle of Thermopylae. The forces at work on both sides of the battle are both horrifying and magnificent. 300 the film builds upon this base, pushing all of these aspect further and amplifying them beyond reality. Miller never shies from hyperbole to convey his message, and the film gladly obliges.

Spoiler warning: While I don’t give away much of the film, or its ending (which is a matter of history, by the way), I show a lot of content, which may give you an inkling of how things go. All images are from the trailers.