Not quite as Homer told it

Rating: 6/10 (16 May 2004)

Troy is a good movie, the cast does a great job, and the only cheesy line is Achilles' "Immortality, take it, it's yours!". But anyone who has read the Illiad, the Odyssey and some history should be disappointed. _SPOILERS_ The movie works well, although it seems a bit hastened, Bana makes a great Hector, Bloom is better playing the weakling Paris than he was in LOTR & Pirates, O'Toole is the best as Priam, and the ladies do well, especially Saffron Burrows as Andromache. Sean Bean was the perfect choice to play the ingenious Odysseus. The weaponry was accordingly fit for the Bronze Age. What was great was how Achilles never bled, and the wound that killed him was the one in the heel, but of course he never saw Troy fell.
Take Menelaus, for example, in the original story he is the only one who gets back safely to his kingdom, with Helen by his side; here they kill him early in the war. The pace of the war is frantic, it seems that it only took 1 month for everything to unfold, when it really took 10 years. Many people were left out, like Priam's daughters Cassandra and Polyxena & his sons Deiphobus and Helenus; Achilles' sons Phyrrus & Neoptolemus; great leaders like Nestor and Diomede were reduced to furniture. Then there are the "cousins": Patroclus was Achilles' best friend and a good warrior, not his sissy squire; Briseis wasn't royalty, just a farmer's daughter. Ajax commits suicide after Achilles is treacherously killed by Paris, who later is killed by an arrow too. Also Achilles famous armor, made by Vulcan, is reduced to nothing as they decide to showcase Pitt's biceps, anyways Bana was much buffer.
In the end is an overall good movie, it just should not be taken as a faithful account of Homer's Trojan War epic. 7 out of 10