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The testosterone-driven tale of blood and guts kicks into high gear when Spartans and Persians collide to the grind of guitars and the bombast of a roaring chorus. Persian emperor Xerxes (Brazilian star Rodrigo Santoro) offers Leonidas favorable terms: If the king will bow the knee, he'll be installed as overseer of all Greece after Xerxes conquers it. But Leonidas would rather die - in fact, he's looking forward to it - and his fellow soldiers gleefully return to the slaughter.

You couldn't say the script by Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Michael Gordon is historically true, but it is a sturdy skeleton for the archetypal story and is an impressive intersection of technology and imagination: The actors were filmed in front of a blue screen in a Montreal studio, but the mountains, the plains, the ocean, the ships, the million-man Persian army, the raging rhino - all computer- generated. Even the blood is digital.

With its shimmering golds, disfigured monsters and seriocomic homoeroticism, the film is artistically triumphant – fueled further with the rumbling score by Tyler Bates. Exceptionally violent, the film is captured almost entirely in slow-motion by cinematographer Larry Fong (Hero) to best marinate the visceral combat choreography minutiae and in the limb-severing, head-lopping sensationalism- a mixture of saturated and desaturated colours.