not a bad film, but takes too many liberties with the story

Rating: 6/10 (24 December 2009)

This is not a bad film, but I was disappointed that so many liberties were taken with the story. For a start, the action of the Iliad happens in the tenth year of the war, whereas from watching the film you would think that the whole war was over within a few weeks. Menelaus and Agamemnon are both killed in the film, whereas we know from Homer that Menelaus returns with Helen to Sparta, where Odysseus's son Telemachus visits him in the Odyssey; as for Agamemnon, he returns to Mycenae, where he is killed by his wife Clytemnestra's lover Aegisthus. In the Iliad Achilles chases Hector around the walls of Troy three times before killing him - this is completely left out in the film. Aeneas is much too young; he should be in the same age range as Odysseus and Ajax as he is one of the foremost Trojan heroes. Some quite major figures are totally absent, e.g. Hecuba, Cassandra, Diomedes. The scene where Priam supplicates Achilles for his son's body is a major disappointment - in the poem, this is the emotional climax of the work, while the sack of Troy, though clearly fated and inevitable, is not explicitly described. The ending of the film completely changes the emphasis, and the crucial meeting between Priam and Achilles loses most of its force. It's entertaining enough as a film in itself, but I would have preferred a more accurate version of the traditional story that has stood the test of time for nearly 3,000 years.