Perhaps if Ms. Puig finds the 300’s unrelenting bravado tiresome, the dialogue too clichéd, and the opposing sides too drawn in "black and white," she should take it up with Herodotus, not a couple of screenwriters. For all its exaggerated combat sequences (this is a comic book movie, after all), 300 deserves credit for staying relatively true to the Greek record of the legendary battle.

Finally, the Washington Post's Stephen Hunter lodges the most refutable complaint of all--that the film "fails to offer any theories of Spartan greatness."

The problem isn't that it 300 offers too few theories of Spartan greatness, it is that, behind all the stylized blood spatter, it offers so many. Not the least of which is that that a people that honors its artists and scholars above its warriors eventually becomes a weak, effeminate people. The grim efficiency of the Spartan career soldiers stands in stark contrast to the brave but incompetent Athenians who hack away at the enemy like, well, like a bunch of actors and craftsmen.

Going hand in hand with this is the demonstration that high military standards must be kindly but firmly maintained, regardless of the hurt feelings such standards might engender. When a well-meaning but physically unfit applicant is turned away from battle, it is clear that Leonidas does not mean to be cruel but to preserve strength of his troop.

Then there are the ideals of Sparta itself, disciplined, controlled, and committed to excellence on every front. Clearly these ideals were taken too far (though does modern America really have room to feel superior to the Spartan custom of discarding imperfect infants?), but their demand for achievement produced achievement. And their unwillingness to become slaves to an ideology from the East helped preserve the tenets of Western Civilization for generations.

Is it any wonder these themes resonated with so few of the preeminent critics of our most popular art? These days it’s not so much about telling young men to come back with their shields or on them, it’s about getting them to pick up a shield in the first place.

The repetitive complaint running through all these reviews about the physical prowess and bold aggressiveness of the Spartan soldiers suggests that anemic intellectual types tend to feel a bit defensive (and perhaps inadequate?) in the face of such traditionally masculine sentiments as honor and country.

Their very discomfort reveals the most significant key to the greatness of the men who died at Thermopylae. Those with the will to win carry the day.