VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

Why the liberal furor over 300? . . . there seems to be an almost elemental anger that such a ‘simplistic’ take on good and evil—West good, East bad—reduced to comic book simplicity has hoodwinked the Neanderthal class in the way they were led by the nose to Iraq by the Bush/Cheney nexus.

But what they fail to grasp is why 300 took off, and, say for example, Oliver Stone’s Alexander bombed, a take that had all the hot-button Hollywood issue from easy homosexuality to the inner crisis over ‘what it all means.’ But critics forget that there were 4 key differences between those two films.

Read the whole thing. Part of it is that the movie industry — or at least the critic section thereof — is stuck in the 1970s, when moral ambiguity and angst used to be groundbreaking and novel. Now they’re overdone, predictable and boring.