AWFUL - a pretentious waste of time

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2004)

Another example of how a big studio prostitutes a story to make it likable to a wide audience, miserably failing in the attempt. It aspires to be much more than what it actually is, almost to the point of being pretentious. Only Eric Bana's performance merits recognition and the storyline deviates too much from the original to be taken seriously. Since when do I go to movies to see "what might have really happened"? Lacked proper character identification, much less development; managed to make a 10 year stalemated siege look like 2 months; completely ignored the role of the immortals (except for making some of the characters look deluded); contains 1-lukewarm love story that is supposed to cause this whole event and 1-ridiculously pointless extraneous love story (ps-if this is what really happened, she would only be a trophy); battle scenes were so shaky it was nauseating. This is just the short list. On the whole, lacked epic feel--should have stayed home and watched Braveheart and Gladiator.