Makes "Helen of Troy" look like a masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2004)

I remember the debate over "Helen of Troy" (HOT) and the people who loved it (maybe influenced a little by Sienna Guillory's backside), those who loathed it, and those, like me, who said it wasn't great but that it was reasonable entertainment. After all, it was made for TV on a limited budget and we shouldn't have expected a masterpiece. And I didn't mind the creative interpretation of the story. I mean to say, the original story is probably fiction anyway, so screen writers should be allowed some licence (Homer is regarded by some academics as being two different authors due to the great differences in The Iliad and The Odyssey).
Throughout this debate, the anti-HOT critics said how wonderful Troy was going to be. Well, I've just seen Troy, and how wrong they were.
Trying to be objective, the two movies may be roughly on a par, although in saying that I think I'm being generous to Troy. The real point is, however, that Troy has far less excuse to be appalling. Despite a great cast and being billed as an epic, it turned out to be as credible and engrossing as a turnip sandwich (or some other word that begins with "tur").
One of the big failures was Brad Pitt, who is normally outstanding in movies. In Troy he was more wooden than a painter's plank (actually, thinking about it, leaden is probably a better word than wooden - the sinking connotations are particularly appropriate). His American accent rang right though the movie, sadly revealing, for the first time in my memory, his limitations as an actor. He was also too small in stature for the part, and the martial arts manoeuvre that he used in the opening battle scene was both geographically and temporarily ridiculous. Perhaps if it had been set in Asia a few centuries later, the Director could have got away with it.
I actually thought that Eric Bana and Brad Pitt played the wrong roles. Bana was pretty average in the movie as well, but The Hulk could have made a great Achilles and Pitt may have been more believable as Hector, who was presumably a great strategist.
Turning to others in the caste, the portrayals of Agamemnon and Menelaus were far more convincing in HOT than in Troy. Rufus Sewell was brilliant in HOT, while the two actors who played the roles in Troy looked like old men going through the motions (I've forgotten the actors' names already, perhaps they will be happy about that). As for Diane Kruger, well, I think I remember seeing her in the movie somewhere. On the positive side, Peter O'Toole was a little better than the others.
Ultimately, however, the real difference between Troy and Helen of Troy was how much you cared at the end. Stories have tension because you care about what happens to the characters. In Helen of Troy, despite the imaginative (critics might say eccentric) interpretation of the story, I found myself caring about the characters and being glad when big Aggie finally got it at the end of the movie. But by the end of Troy, I wanted to see the whole cast killed off.