For those of you who have not heard of it, 300 is a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae, where a tiny force of Spartan soldiers fought back an immense army of Persians before finally being overwhelmed in a heroic last stand. It is a beautiful movie - the visuals are mindblowing, the action is intense, and it’s generally a great deal of fun. It is not, however, a movie you should think about.

Made at a slightly inopportune time, at its worst it comes across as a xenophobic reveling in brutal violence, and of course the ubiquitous triumph of the free-loving West over the swarming hordes of the East. Now I assume the director wasn’t insensitive enough to intend all that, but one of the things you learn as a designer is that you need to be very conscious of the meanings associated with your work, even if you didn’t put it there on purpose.

That said, that’s not really what this movie’s about. It’s about being able to root for the good guys and boo at the bad guys, both of which are drawn in the most stark, uncomplicated fashion imaginable. The Spartans represent honour and freedom, and the Persians represent loose morals, imperialism, and slavery. It doesn’t even really pretend to be historical, and even the visuals reflect its abstraction into mythology. It fulfills that deep-down desire to look at things in black-and-white and know, for once, that the side you support really is the right one. This is a luxury that we don’t have in the real world, especially when it comes to something as complicated as conflict.

This is why 300 has been so popular - besides looking great, it’s sufficiently distant from contemporary wars that you don’t need to (or want to) frame it in current moral terms. We can revel in its clarity of message and just go along for the ride. Or maybe it’s just because it’s managed to integrate soft-core porn into mainstream cinema. Either or.

Now the question becomes, would George Bush be a Spartan, or a Persian…