Uh oh. Early reviews for 300 have been mixed. We were looking forward to a movie - excited even - for the first time in 2007, but the suicidal Spartan CGI flick currently scores just 53 on Metacritic, based on 32 reviews.

Some liked it. “A feast for the senses (well, two of them anyway) and an impressive technical achievement,” said Film Threat. “More than that, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.” And Rolling Stone were impressed with its visceral blood and guts ferocity, saying “300 is a movie blood-drunk on its own artful excess. Guys of all ages and sexes won’t be able to resist it.”

But plenty other publications were unimpressed with the films heartlessness.

“The bigger question to ask about 300 is why, for a supposedly rousing tale of heroism, it’s so curiously unaffecting,” asked Salon.com. The Washington Post called it “a guilty unpleasantness” while the New York Times was more interested in playing “the video game that 300 aspires to become.”

But most damning of all was the Village Voice who said

It’s a ponderous, plodding, visually dull picture, but the blame shouldn’t be put on Snyder’s skills per se, and has nothing to do with his ambition to blur the distinction between CGI and photography. Frankly, it’s the slavish, frame-by-frame devotion to Miller’s source material that’s the problem … Snyder seems to have forgotten that where comic-book panels indicate movement, movies can actually move.

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