The knee-jerk reaction on the part of critics is obviously a well-practiced form of subversion without consideration of the fact that we are dealing with something obviously more distressing than "20 million closet cases." Let's not forget that critics can be petty, just like anybody else, and in their somewhat anonymous roles, they like to shocking once in a while.

Calling a generation of young men gay for liking a movie is a fairly easy way to do this. The more impressive thing would be for a groundswell of critics to sack up and call a generation of young men out for being rather dim for liking a movie whose narrator explains things to the audience with a level of condescension we haven't seen since, oh, I don't know, Cecil B. Demille, another practitioner of the epic heroism misidentified as homoeroticism (see the moments of admiring recognition between Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston in the 10 Commandments).

Combine this with the idiocy of the movie's resolution with the audience's indifference to the standard rules of plotting, and you have what you have. What I think is odd is that while we are fully willing to suggest that everybody who likes this movie is gay, without considering the consequences of such a statement, no one cares to make the more apparent statement that nobody who enjoys this movie has much ability to successfully assess whether they have even been skillfully entertained, which in my opinion, in much scarier than having a generation of machismophiles running around ruining our castrated conception of heroism.