With his “Dawn Of The Dead” remake, Zach Snyder burst on the film scene like an oversized Tom Savini bloodpack. ‘Dead’ was philosophically muddled— Snyder reduced Romero’s broad satire to just another minor generic convention— but the movie was still confident and fun. He mixed the best scary elements of Romero’s originals with the newer, grizzlier fare of biohazard beauties like “28 Days Later”, adding a shot of snarky wit that wisely stopped well short of cuteness. If you closed your eyes and pretended such things didn’t matter, its gleeful and dunderheaded nihilism was a fantastic adrenaline rush. It was an impressive feature debut for the former video director.

His follow-up, “300”, cements his place as a sharp, poised director of the new school of horror/adventure filmmaking: passably intelligent cartoons that are little more than canny riffs on familiar genres but no less entertaining for that. Like “Sin City”, the other Frank Miller adaptation to date, “300” brazenly cops to its inspiration, the grimy, washed-out graphic novel written and drawn by Miller and colored by Lynn Varley. With the benefit of twenty truckloads of CGI artists, the movie is a two-hour visit to a he-man abbatoir: arms hacked off, legs sliced to ribbons, guts splattered every which way.

This isn’t the sort of swordplay for the “A touch, a touch!” crowd. Snyder likes puréed flesh and the howls of the newly-dismembered. During the battle scenes the blood flies so thick and heavy it’s like a nasty violet-colored gravy that seems to have fallen from the sky; surely that much blood couldn’t have spilled out of some punctured skin. It is scary and a little uncanny, and therefore a distinctly an un-Spartan document. If “300” follows in the long tradition of horror films, in which images and symbols of sex and death mingle promiscuously—and it does have much more in common with horror films than historical epics—then this has to be a cinema first: the violence stands in for a big, energetic, lovingly choreographed, homoerotic gang-bang.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There’s a lot right with it, actually. “300” is a baroque bloodbath that would satisfy the most finicky fans of these sorts of affairs. Everything is photographed with the hard eye of a sensual lapidarist rather that a pornographer in full swamp fever. The digital palette gives the movie a painted quality, as if illustrated rather than photographed, and Snyder’s brushstrokes are deft.

The Spartans are plain, unadorned soldiers, all the more effective as a contrast to the Eurotrash Persians who look like they’ve just found out their favorite disco has been shut down. Colors are stunning, the royal ruby red of the Spartans clashing with the gaudy golds of the Persians. Silver swords and pulsing muscles are caked with deep crimson (blood) and charred browns (mud). The battle scenes are both vivid and dim at the same time, like a heavy thunderstorm breaking on a summer noon. The filth gleams.

“300” exists for its visual style and nothing else. The speeches about reason versus madness tickle the ears and leave the mind unbothered. The subtext of war between Occident and Orient is both obvious and compelling. But though Snyder has the honesty not to back down from the parallel to current events, and flirts with casual racism, he renders these underlying themes inert by casting the movie as a localized meta-commentary. Told in flashback by a survivor commissioned by Leonidas, the top Spartan, the movie has nothing to do with fighting for civilization’s most sacred principles and everything to do with the need for war-time propaganda. “300” is about the sexiness of war stories. That’s all it wants to be. That’s all it tries to be.

Although Snyder thus avoided the nastier implications of Miller’s tale, the baby goes with the bathwater. Satire was removed from “Dawn of the Dead” and in this one politics get the chop. Everything gives way to aesthetics: amid the lovely killing all pretexts and themes melt away, including story, plot, characters. Visually it’s as glorious and seductive as one could hope for in a tale of valorous Greek heroes—and it all works to numb, desensitize, and dispirit us. There’s just no fun in Snyder’s fun.