...The greatest movie that should never have been made?

I dunno, it just left a really, really bad taste in my mouth.

Some nice fight choreography, good battle cinematics, but atrocious script, acting, and the amount of poetic license they took from the Iliad was unforgivable (but I'm a Classics student, so I'm going to be very critical, no matter what they do). It was tolerable, so long as no one was talking, and so long as none of the poor orchestral score was playing in the background.

I think the battle scenes, particularly the very first army-line-up scene against Thessaly, were very well done. Finally I have a concrete visual image of what an ammassed hoplite army might have looked like (even though hoplites wern't officially used as army standard until the city-state era centuries AFTER this period...).

And I realise that this movie did not try to sell itself as a theatrical representation of the Iliad, but I can't help but instinctually make that comparison, and as such this film falls as flat on it's face as most of the muscle-bound beefcakes portrayed in it (even the ones that didn't die in the Iliad but did in this one because they were what Hollywood likes to black-and-whitely portray as 'bad guys').

Now, I'm keen to talk turkey, and mention spoilers, but I'll only do so after enough people have watched it themselves. But the bottom line is that this film is little more than another example of Hollywood watering down and distorting another masterpiece of human literary tradition in the hopes of making big bucks. The level of Americana involved is inexcusable... Hollywood I hate you so damned much!!

;)

[ 05-15-2004, 02:04 AM: Message edited by: The Hierophant ]

Agreed and agreed. Pray that Peterson does not attempt his (heavy) hand at making a movie of The Odyssey or (God forbid (lol)) Paradise Lost.