At least I can talk about Trojans without snickering.

Rating: 7/10 (6 January 2005)

Set around 1250 B.P., King Agamemnon of Mycenae is conquering yet another land. While their armies are massed for battle, he offers to settle the fight with a duel between their best warrior and his. They send out a giant soldier; the Greeks summon Achilles and being the Greatest Warrior of All, he triumphs with a single strike of his sword. Although he serves Agamemnon, Achilles is openly in contempt of his king and is reluctant to put him and his men in service to the King's expansionist goals.
At the celebration, we meet the Spartan leader Menelaus whose wife Helen has been carrying on a brief affair with Paris for no legitimate reason other than he's freaking Orlando Bloom and her husband isn't. When Paris beseeches her to come back to Troy with him, she agrees, but Paris's brother Hector is less than pleased when he finds out what has happened on the trip back.
Understandably peeved, Menelaus asks Agamemnon to go to war against the impenetrable fortress city-state that is Troy to get his woman back. Agamemnon agrees because if he conquers Troy, he'll have control of all the useful world, so in this case, Helen is the excuse for war, not the reason.
Assembling the legendary fleet of a thousand ships in what appears to be a few days the Greeks sail for Troy. In a Bronze Age version of Saving Private Ryan the Greeks get their butts rightly whooped on the beach until Achilles and his band of brothers are able to storm the beach and defile the Temple of Apollo, where Achilles captures and then woos Briseis a cousin of Hector and Paris who'd joined the order of virgins in service to Apollo.
It's decided that Menelaus and Paris should battle to settle who gets the girl. Paris proves he is no match and he's about to be cut down when Hector steps up, killing Menelaus and guaranteeing there's not going to be peace anytime soon.
Everybody was ragging on Troy for not being true to Homer's The Illiad. Well, that is always important to be true to the story, but I'm not too familiar with the story, so I don't care. The film is very entertaining. Pitt is surprisingly amazing as the great warrior. Bana is equally talented playing Hector. The acting in the film all around is top notch. The film is very underrated and to me, the best film of the year. It was so much more than I expected, thanks to the negative reviews. One of my favorite movies.
****/*****