An Honest Review

Rating: 2/10 (7 January 2017)

I know, I know, I worked in history, the Iliad is a classic...yadda, yadda, yadda. Don't worry I'm not going to hate on it for historical inaccuracies and I won't hate on it for really not following the story.
I mean, it's Hollywood, historical accuracy can only go so far for entertainment reasons and, well, the real Iliad reads like, well, like rape porn. There's a reason you only get the abridged version in school and a reason that you'll never see an accurate unabridged version on the big screen...unless Paul Verhoeven is attached to direct.
I am going to hate on the film though. Brad Pitt looked great, kudos to really trying for the Greek God look. Unfortunately that doesn't really make up for a poor performance. We know he can act, we've all seen it before, but he just did the action movie phone in here and that took away from the film as a whole.
I wouldn't blame him though. Wolfgang Petersen is really at fault here. The Iliad is one part history--in the Jewish Biblical sense, one part super hero book, and one part sex.
He cut the sex.
And the rest he couldn't exactly get a grip on. He went for classic epic ala Ben Hur instead and that's not really the Iliad. It need the surreal godly pantheon to keep it interesting and fantastical and he cut the bulk of that for more realism and, well, and it failed.
The result was a boring film that was trying to be both melodrama and action pic. The reality is that the Iliad is only a melodramatic classic because of age. In reality, well, it's an action/adventure tale of supermen and gods that inspired people like Alex the Great. Approaching like a classic work of art just, well, it just makes it long and boring.
The action was there, but done in a choppy half-hearted way, as if Petersen wanted to rush it as fast as possible to get to the melodrama and make the film an epic as modern lit saw it and not, well, the Homeric adventure poem it always was.
It drags until the end with understated characters that are nowhere near the demigods they are in the poem...and then falls flat at the end, killed by too much realism.