Wretched waste of celluloid and time

Rating: 1/10 (2 December 2007)

We happened upon this film last night on AMC. My partner teaches the classics each year and spent much of her time in grad school immersing herself in Greek drama. As each minute crept by with horrific boredom, we felt appalled by the cheap, anachronistic sets and special effects, terrible writing and direction, and pitifully bad acting. You have to be an incredibly poor director to make a film that drags on for more than three excruciating hours feel rushed in terms of storyline. Most of the actors felt as though they were mired in some horrendous high school production. In fact, many high school productions are far better than this ill-conceived piece of garbage. I have to admit, I've never considered Brad Pitt a convincing actor, let alone a sex symbol. He just looks like some adenoidal frat boy who drinks too much. Diane Kruger as Helen was unpardonably miscast. She had neither the beauty nor the acting chops to make one think she was worth all the lives and cultures sacrificed. Too many actors slipped in and out of bad accents that distracted one's attention from the storyline. As for the costumes, they looked like something cobbled together from a hippie vintage shop. I taught art history for several years, and the sets were just plain wrong in terms of chronology, location and architecture. Many of the sets looked like the Egyptians meet the Incans. As my partner pointed out, it is unforgivable to present a film that could have been a golden opportunity to interest students in reading the Greeks as some Hollywoodized gore fest at the end. It is far more powerful to follow the texts and have Priam witness the destruction of his family and land, just as it is more intriguing to have Agamemnon return home only to be ensnared in Clytemnestra's net.