300 reasons to stop eating the popcorn

christopher goodwin in Los Angeles joins the boys in the blood-curdling theatre of war

Critics of the movie 300, Hollywood's latest bloodbuster, have been claiming the film is a thinly veiled allegory about the war in Iraq. If it is, it has certainly hit a nerve. 300 stunned Hollywood pundits by taking an astonishing $70m in its first three days this weekend, breaking all kinds of box office records.

Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, 300 is a computer graphics-laden, comic strip gore-fest about the battle of Thermopylae in 480BC, when 300 Spartans are supposed to have held off as many as 250,000 Persian troops for three days before being slaughtered, long enough to halt a Persian takeover of Greece.

Some have suggested that Xerxes, the god-king ruler of the Persians, must be George W Bush, throwing his massive 'shock and awe' army at a small country, trying to