Truly this is a battle with a circus-like cast. This is before we get on to an enormous raging rhino and bedecked elephants. Most of the warriors are literally larger than life: the actors playing the Spartans reveal most of their bodies with digitally-enhanced muscles, while on Xerxes' side characters include a huge hunchback, a giant emissary and a claw-armed executioner as well the metal-masked Immortals. Gerard Butler plays King Leonidas with a Scottish accent, while the Brazilian Rodrigo Santoro is a version of Xerxes bejewelled with ethnic metalwork.

There are no big names in the cast list which helps the sense of history but does not raise the thespian talent quotient. I was fortunate enough to see it in IMAX and I regularly felt blood-splattered and exhausted and quite ready to leap into the action. And yet, as entertainment, it has much to offer: the sepia-tinged visuals are absolutely stunning and the fight sequences viscerally exciting. Both versions use the legendary exchange: 'When we attack today, our arrows will blot out the sun!' 'Good then we will fight in the shade.' But only '300' has such fun lines as: 'Spartans! Enjoy your breakfast, for tonight we dine in Hell!' Ever since its first public showing at the Berlin Film Festival, most critics have mauled '300' and it presents an easy target for those wanting something more cerebral: there is virtually no plot or characterisation, the script is sparse and bland, much of the acting is exaggerated and over-loud, when it is not homo-erotic it is oddly camp, and the whole thing is stereotypical when it is not outright xenophobic and politically incorrect. This time the director is Zack Snyder, known for his music videos, and the location is a studio set in Montreal with green backgrounds later filled by superb computer-generated graphics and the whole storybook style is based on the graphic novel by co-producer Frank Miller. '300' takes the same basic narrative and presents it in an utterly different style in a blood-fest when 'The Wild Bunch' meets 'Kill Bill' and the visuals are like nothing except 'Sin City'. The story was first told on film in 1962 when director Rudolph MatГ© went to Greece and shot a worthy, but conventional and surprisingly leaden, version entitled 'The 300 Spartans', starring American Richard Egan as King Leonidas and the British David Farrar as Xerxes. Whatever the actual figures, the odds against the Spartans were terrible, death was inevitable, and their honour secure. In truth, the Spartans were backed by a mixed force of almost 7,000, while there are enormous variations in modern estimates of the multi-ethnic Persian army, but somewhere between 100,000-200,000 seems realistic. The 480 BC Battle of Thermopylae is the stuff of military legend when, in popular lore, a mere 300 Spartans commanded by King Leonidas held off a Persian force led by Xerxes the Great that Herodotus claimed as 2.6 million.

Watch free movie 300