IT has been hailed as the battle movie to end all battle movies. A film so brutal, bloody and stirring, that it defines a new wave of war movies.

300 is war porn on an epic scale, an orgy of violence that even Quentin Tarantino would find somewhat satiable.

An adaptation of another graphic novel by Frank Miller, whose work is in vogue after it was turned into the gut-wrenching Sin City two years ago, it is another impressive if vacuous approach.

Computer graphics are put into the comic strip to create a setting where there are fewer boundaries.

It is also film that is courting controversy and enraged Iranians at a time of diplomatic tension with the West.

The film is a retelling of the incredible story of how 300 Spartans, a tiny band of ferocious Ancient Greek warriors, resisted a brutal invasion at the hands of 300,000 Persian, the country now known as Iran, by holding a coastal pass during the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC.

The Iranian regime has slammed the film as portraying the Persians as "ugly and violent creatures rather than human beings" and denounced as a Western conspiracy and Hollywood declaring war on their country.

Not surprisingly it has smashed all box office records in Greece and has apparently been zealously cheered on by US Marines at their huge Camp Pendleton in California.

How it will be perceived on these shores remains to be seen.