The story was all wrong!

Rating: Null/10 (25 November 2004)

I saw this film as I have studied Classics at school and wanted to see how the film portrayed the war in itself and the various events. I was annoyed by the inaccuracy of much of the film. As a past student of Classics much of my A-Level course was focused on the Trojan War, the Aeneid and plays that told of the characters in this story.
The film itself was directed very well and there were some good actors. It seemed to me that this was just a piece of normal storytelling not a great epic. It most certainly was not a great epic film. As I knew the story beforehand of several of the characters I expected to see what i knew but I didn't.
There were several things wrong. Men die in the story when in fact they left the war unscathed. At the beginning of the film Menelaus is killed. This is untrue as Menelaus left after the 10 years with Helen again after Paris had been killed and Agamemnon did not die in the heat of battle as his wife kills him later on as seen in the play "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus after he had returned with the sister of Paris and Hector, Cassandra. She was killed too. Achilles is killed outside the walls of Troy in "the shade of the Scaean Gate" by Paris with a poisoned arrow which struck him in the heel (at birth Thetis, mother on Achilles, had dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal but had held him by his heel so his heel wasn't protected by power) but in the film he was killed inside the city, which was wrong. I did like the appearance of Aeneas at the end with his elderly father Anchises. I thought it was very good as in the Aeneid Aeneas leads his followers (survivors of Troy) to found the new city of Rome.
I did like the dramatic effects but on a scale of one to ten I would rate it as 3.