Director Zach Snyder said it best when he said his movie, “300,” is a “graphic novel movie about a bunch of guys … stomping the snot out of each other.” That may seem like over-simplifying, but that’s how it should be seen. The story is age-old, the stuff of longer and older epic movies.

Persia takes over most of the known world and continues to widen its grip to a military-obsessed Sparta. King Leonidas kicks a Persian messenger into a large well and begins a war that pits 300 Spartan warriors against more than 100,000 Persians. The story of the 300 Spartans has been used in innumerable texts, movies, plays and poems since the story was first told, inspiring countless wars in the name of democracy and national/ military pride.

However, walking out of the theater after the digital bloodbath, you’ll be better off giving high fives and whooping to the full moon with the awesome fight sequences playing over in your mind than trying to talk about the movie meaningfully. On one hand, “300” deserves credit for filling most of the movie with a gritty ballet of death and mayhem, including ninjas, humpbacks and – on more than one occasion – piles of dead bodies being cleverly arranged. With the assistance of a sweeping, slow motion, without which the movie would possibly run an hour shorter, the spears pass gracefully through giant animals, spectacular costumes and human flesh like the fluttering of a dancer’s feet in the air.

Fans of the “300” graphic novel author, Frank Miller, will be pleased to see many of the frames from the comic represented exactly on the big screen, the background often literally being taken from the comic and planted into the movie. Visuals aside, though, there is not much to be said.

However, fans of Miller’s graphic novel will likely roll their eyes at the cliche addition of Queen Gorgo’s fight against a male-dominated bureaucracy for additional troops, used to cheaply broaden the movie’s appeal. The dialogue is nothing more than cheap, romance-novel prose, and it is doubtful that a Spartan warrior king would use words like “m’lady.” Any additional reading into the film brings up uncomfortable subtexts of our “civilized democracy’s” struggle to defeat the godless, slave- and monster-toting evil of the east.

In these politically and socially conscious times, an American film urging the glory of war, depicting only characters with deformities, brown skin or Arab descent inevitably as the enemies, should reconsider its timing. The fighting was good, and it takes only a little bite of watching to know that the violence is the only reason the movie was made; everything else is, and feels, unconsidered.