Decent action flick, crummy drama.

Rating: Null/10 (27 May 2004)

(contains minor spoilers, stuff you probably know already)
Well, I'm not a high culture buff and I've never read The Iliad, but this movie failed to impress me. I am NOT a big action movie fan, but I think action fans will like it (I went with two, and they LOVED it). Big scenes and battles, along with the obligatory attractive women and typical cheesy hero cliches will attract the action crowd.
As for me, I liked the visuals, the music and the direction overall. Wolfgang Petersen is a pretty good, solid director. Almost every scene in the film effectively conveyed grandeur, power, and energy! It also really gave you the feeling of being back in time. I was impressed by that, so the movie didn't bore me or anything. But I didn't think the story worked, artistically...
They tried to make the Trojans the "good guys", but it just didn't work, and I don't see how it ever could. After all, Troy started the war by kidnapping a woman at an up-till-then successful PEACE MEETING, and then continued the war by keeping her. How does one make that look heroic? Well, apparently, not very easily. They tried to make you feel sympathy for Helen, but I mean come ON. A huge war because some chick is tired of her husband? Imagine how many wars we could have today on that basis, heh! And it certainly didn't help that Paris (the guy who wooed Helen) was a trash-talking wimp who never backed up his big heroic promises.
They try to make you hate the Greeks by portraying Agamemnon as a greedy old jerk, but it doesn't fit with the setup of the story. The great heroes are Achilles and Odysseus, who are both Greek, so they come across seeming very strange, like heroes who somehow ended up on the wrong side, a side they hated (I kept expecting them both to defect to the Trojan side). You end up feeling sorry for the Trojans, just because they're such fools! And you feel sorry for the heroes because they spent their whole lives fighting for nothing, or for "bad people".
Not satisfying. Not satisfying as a tragedy, not satisfying as a drama, not satisfying as an epic, and only satisfying as a movie because of Wolfgang Petersen and some nice action sequences. IMHO.