Good adaptation of the Iliad story for modern people

Rating: 8/10 (2 June 2004)

I thought the film did an excellent job of adapting the Iliad story for a modern audience. When I read the Iliad in high school it was the most difficult muck that I ever had to wade through, and so difficult to understand because there were so many different characters with 4 different names per character, and by adding all the actions of the gods to that, it was pretty incomprehensible. However, the film minimizes the characters to only the important ones (although there are still a lot of characters), and cuts out the gods, which makes the film more applicable and understandable to today's modern audience. The film is like a version of the Iliad that says, "This is the story as it actually happened to human beings," instead of reducing the credibility of it by having multiple gods take all sorts of actions.
Also, the film did a good job of portraying the characters as real people, and of showing their motivations for doing things. In the Iliad, a lot of times it wasn't clear why people did anything. In the book they just say, "Paris kidnapped Helen," without ever going into why Paris was so willing to risk a huge war over this woman (I don't think it was just for a pretty face). I thought it was good that the movie went into more detail about that, explaining the motivations and made it seem more realistic.
Overall, it was an interesting film, although there were some historical inaccuracies (which will not be mentioned here for spoiler content), if you consider Herodotus to be historically accurate.