Troy is a great movie, but please read the original to learn the truth as told by the blind Homer.

Rating: Null/10 (5 January 2005)

Troy is a well made feature epic film on the scale and magnificience of Gladiator and Braveheart. Having said this, if I was not familiar with Homer's original Iliad, I would have loved this adaptation more. I believe Wolfgang Peterson wanted to create a more noble image of Hector than what we know of him through Homer's blind eyes. Achilles is made a bit more brutish and unfeeling than Homer would have liked, but not near as distorted as Hector. I must admit that I favor the Dardanians (the Trojans), but the Achaians (the Greeks) were the "good guys" according to Homer. Troy was an arrogantly proud city thumbing its nose from the Hellespont seeing itself unconquerable and the center of the civilized world. Homer's tale is about how such arrogant vanity can be brought down. Hector is a microcosm of this whole theme. His fight with Patroclos, a grown man and second in command of Achilles' Myrmidons in the real story, was not a case of mistaken identity. Hector knew who he was fighting, and he actually stabbed Patroclos in the back while the Greek hero was fighting among a throng of Trojans. Hector then steals the armor off of the dead Patroclos and puts it on in an attempt to mock Achilles and the Greeks. Achilles' revenge is not so petty in the original story as Peterson depicts in his version. But even in spite of huge discrepancies as the one just elaborated on, Peterson's film is worth watching and enjoying. I just hope that people will take up a good translation of the Iliad and read the story as it was originally told. The gods have a great deal to do with the outcome of the war, but it is the cunning of men and their courage that made the whole event worth telling to the generations of people that came after that glorious time of around 1200 B.C.