Hard to do any better within 3 hours

Rating: 8/10 (5 June 2004)

The performance of the film is absolutely fantastic. If it was a newly invented story, this film would have deserved 10 points without any doubt. But that's the problem about it: Homer's Ilias is a thick book, the story is full of complex and not less important sidelines and all in all it describes 10 years of war. A film simply can't do this in 3 hours; so all elements of the original story are missing which have no special interest to the main storyline, for example the Greek gods, kassandra and most of the previous life of the heroes. What is left is the main story about the war against Troja and the surface of the Greek tragedy - and I was astonished that it still works perfectly, even there are little changes to parts of the story (Agamemmnon was killed by his wife Klytemnaestra when back in Sparta again for example). Putting the Ilias in just one film might be comparable to if they had made only one film out of the Lord of the Rings.