Epic.

Rating: 10/10 (7 June 2004)

Is it possible to do a review without a least a little spoilage?
This movie was so fantastic that I actually managed to shake my anal book-to-movie requirement checklist and just enjoy Troy. So what that Patroclus was not Achilles' cousin, that Briseis was nowhere near that prominent of a character, that the only god/goddess to make a cameo was Achilles' mother, Thetis, in a much smaller role than she was entitled to? Okay, so it bugged me a little bit. But the book is 3000 years old, and has been retold thousands of times in thousands of ways. If people don't get the gist of it by now, then who's to say that they ever will? It did bug me that they left out the whole story of Nestor leading Patroclus to his death. And I was a little miffed by the mispronunciation of Briseis, Menalaus, and Priam. But the discovery that Eric Bana actually CAN act well made up for it, I must say. And even though the scene with the knife was never in The Iliad, I must say that I appreciated its addition for Brad Pitt's Achilles.
All in all, I got past the book, which is something I can almost never do. I highly recommend this beautiful movie to anyone, and it is worth every minute of the three hours it takes. Four stars.