Pitiful sword-and-sandals epic but not Homer (Spoiler)

Rating: Null/10 (22 June 2004)

It's odd that given the production cost of this film no one involved seems to have actually bothered reading the work it claims to derive from. Of course one expects the wooden horse to appear even though this does not feature in the Iliad. What one does not expect is to have Achilles leaping from it - Paris should have shot him long before the siege ends, an event predicted in the Iliad and referred to in the Odyssey. The killing of Agamemnon by Achilles is a ridiculous embellishment that could only have been produced by someone with a complete lack of understanding of the Iliad and associated post-Homerica such as the Orestaia. Worst of all is the slaying of Menelaus by Hector in order to protect Paris: Menelaus returns (with Helen) after the war; both feature in the Odyssey.
This is a hugely disappointing film whose only redeeming features are the acting of Eric Bana, Peter O'Toole and Sean Bean. I had hoped that a director of Petersen's ability would be capable of delivering something superior to the stilted 1956 version by Robert Wise, which at least has the merit of being reasonably faithful to its sources: it is quite a remarkable achievement to have generated something worse.