Well, it was alright, you know, as big-budget epics go...

Rating: Null/10 (17 May 2004)

It was late at night, about three hours after I got out of the theatre from seeing Troy, and thinking that it was all around a generally good time when suddenly, as I was drifting off to sleep, a sudden thought caused me to sit bolt upright in bed. Wait a minute, I said, didn't the Trojan War last ten years? The movie version of the greatest siege of the ancient world condenses the entire battle down to about two or three weeks - including the time taken to build the famous Horse. Other than this obvious conundrum (this would be the reason the credits say "Inspired by The Iliad" instead of "Based on the Iliad"), this was a very good movie. An old-fashioned costume epic that's heavy on the spectacle without losing sight of the human element, it conjures up the massive undertakings of Cecil B. DeMille's historical epics.
Of course, it has a cast of 50,000 computer-generated Greeks, but it never feels fake, and gives us a plethora of heroes and villains on both sides of the war to root for and boo. Contrast this to the last two Lord of the Rings films, which are wonderful, but tend to descend into a mishmash of CGI whenever a battle starts and loses sight of its characters. No one's giving away any endings here, but honestly, unless you've lived in a soundproof box or Antarctica your entire life or never opened a book, you know what happens at the end. Yet the ending doesn't disappoint - It's not like the final moment when the Titanic sinks. Troy keeps you guessing till the end.