Director Zack Snyder's cerebral, scintillating follow-up to "300" seems, to even a weary filmgoer's eye, as fresh and magnificent in sound and vision as "2001" must have seemed in 1968, yet in its eagerness to argue with itself, it resembles "A Clockwork Orange." Like those Stanley Kubrick films - it is also in part a parody of "Dr. Strangelove" - it transforms each moment into a tableau with great, uncompromising concentration. The effect is an almost airless gloom, but the film is also exhilarating in breadth and depth.
There is more going on in the spectacular opening-credits sequence than in the three "Spider-Man" flicks combined. "Watchmen" author Alan Moore (who considers the film a bastard stepchild and demanded not to be mentioned in those credits) possesses a superpower denied nearly all of his competitors: irony. A yellow smiley face stained with blood is his Bat logo.
