Somewhat entertaining, but not accurate

Rating: Null/10 (5 August 2005)

The movie Troy has some entertaining parts and Eric Bana does a nice job of playing Hector, but don't mistake this for anything close or faithful to the original story. As noted in the trivia/errors section for this movie, a number of characters die in the movie that survive in the poem (at least until later times), much of the equipment and battle techniques are wrong, and the core of the Achilles character is totally wrong. In the Illiad Achilles is vain, powerful, proud, and given to fits of anger and intense jealousy and hurt feelings. The movie attempts to show this by having him fly into a rage when his war prize is taken by Agamemmnon. Achilles is supposedly upset by this because he has some kind of deep feeling for her. In the poem, it is quite clear that he attached no particular importance to her other then as a prize he has won in battle. He is enraged when she is taken not because he loves her, but because it is a loss of face in front of the men to be upstaged by a king he feels is unworthy of the title. There is no love interest plot line(unless you want to suggest a homosexual one between Achilles and Patrocolus). I understand that the writer/director had to condense a lot of material, but a lot of these changes just don't make sense. The Illiad is not a poem about war. Otherwise, it wouldn't start the narrative nine years into a ten year siege that we also don't see the end of. It's about human passion and emotion and becoming more human, as well as telling an entertaining story of conquest and battle. It was the action movie blockbuster of its time but still had 1000% more heart and humanity then the adaptation. Whoever wrote this movie may have read the poem, but they clearly didn't understand it. Some nice acting, but a poor job of translating the story to the big screen.