The Spartans were heavy metal all day. They had robots, too, but more like horses. One of the Spartan horsebots was supersmart, not from the gift of any god, but because the old Spartan warrior engineer who had created it was just such a good maker and had endowed it with the finest clockwork brain ever made. Horsebot started to tell the future, and because they were so awed by this talking metal horse, they believed it must know. And what it predicted was that the world would soon end in a flood. And that the only way to stop the flood would be to capture the owlbot of Atlantis and dissect it to extract its knowledge of how to speak to the gods.

The Spartans won, because of the things the goddess Aphrodite did to trick the Atlanteans and please her lover Ares, the god of war and electric guitars, under whose patronage the Spartans had thrived.

Aphrodite also seduced Hephaestus, the R&D lab of the gods, into serving Ares and equipping the Spartans with the gear they needed for their mission.

Toward the end of the movie, there was this awesome scene where the waves dispatched by the angry Poseidon deluge Atlantis. That was stop-motion, too, with this insanely detailed model that looked around the same scale as the plastic kits Donny had built as a kid but big enough to fill a hotel ballroom. Watching it Donny imagined the guys standing there with hoses slowly drowning the beautiful thing they had made, and enjoying it.

We are all waiting for the big wave to wash it all away.

Way down, below the ocean.

Donny’s buddies loved Wrath of Atlantis so much they got the companion video game. There was a whole semester Donny’s second year when he was trying very hard for once to get decent grades and the sound from the main room every night was a continuous stream of electronic sword swings, magic gun bursts, kung-fu kicks and meaty punches, all to the soaring but repetitive and tinny power riffs of the soundtrack excerpt that played in the background. Every half hour or so there would be a pause, and you would hear the watery burble of the bong rip, and then it would start again.