Was thinking about a "It's Only Humanist"-style essay that considers the movie 300 as the dark side of digital creatives' supposed fascination with all things ancient and Greek. The pitch would go something like
300 reflects young filmmakers' yearning for manly virtue and ancient rituals of violence in the disconnected, affectless time of the Internet. The Spartans' CGI abs and pecs conjure a warrior cult of the body, in contrast to the aestheticized holistic beauty favored by the Athenians: free-floating signifiers of sweaty buffness but also a grotesque cyborg "skinning" of the human form.
Unfortunately writing this would entail watching 300 in its entirety.