Troy (2004)

When Paris (Orlando Bloom), a prince of Troy, runs of with Helen (Diane Kruger), the wife of Menelaus the King of Sparta (Brendan Gleeson), the King's brother Agamemnon (Brian Cox) uses it as an excuse to start a war with Troy. Loosely, very loosely based on THE ILIAD by Homer and directed by Wolfgang Petersen (DAS BOOT). An atrocity that makes a travesty of Homer's epic. Where does one start? The movie has Hector (Eric Bana) kill Menelaus early in the movie when in THE ILIAD, Menelaus survives and takes Helen back to Greece. Here, Helen and Paris live happily ever after. Here, Agamemnon is killed by a Trojan high priestess (Rose Byrne) while he survived the war and was murdered by his wife when he returned to Greece. The Trojan War lasted ten years, Petersen has it last months. There are many more but I'll leave it at that. As Achilles, Brad Pitt is given a blonde dye job and he looks more like a Malibu surfer than a Greek warrior. As Helen, Diane Kruger is cute as a button but she couldn't launch a canoe much less a thousand ships and as Paris, the scrawny Orlando Bloom exhibits zero magnetism. In BEN-HUR (1959), when you saw that cast of thousands, they were real people, here they're obvious computer generated images which makes the battle sequences unimpressive. In THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (1964), when you saw the awesome Roman Forum, those were real buildings built for the film. Here, they're CGI background and look it. At three and a half hours, this is a real slog and badly acted (as Agamemnon, Brian Cox acts as if he were in a pirate movie and he's playing Blackbeard The Pirate). Unclean! With Peter O'Toole, Julie Christie, Sean Bean and Saffron Burrows.