I should have stayed home and drunk myself into oblivion instead.
It had some nice touches.
The Thousand Ships scene was beautiful, and Diane Kruger was a splended Helen. It's easy to believe that she could have launched them all.
The scenery and costumes were good. I liked the armor. The Greeks had a slightly more European look, the Trojans more a Middle Eastern look, which was believable.
And Brad was not bad. He had worked out, and his tough muscular appearance and demeanor made him appropriately brutish. I was hoping against hope that they would surprise me and have him cast as Paris instead of Achilles, a role for which he would have been well suited. (Remember that beautiful bronze statue of ladies-man Paris in the National Museum in Athens?)
Orlando Bloom, by the way, was badly miscast. He was neither pretty enough nor shallow enough for Paris.
Brian Cox and Brendan Gleeson were appropriately brutish as Agamemnon and Menelaus. Sean Bean was good as Ulysses.
But all this notwithstanding, this movie is the biggest Hollywood hack job since Lady Catherine de Berg turned out to be a sweet old lady back in the 1940 Greer Garson/Laurence Olivier "Victorian" Pride and Prejudice atrocity.
Hollywood hacks can not resist "improving" on tales told by far better minds than theirs.
The chances that Brad Pitt--or any of these clowns, for that matter--have actually read The Iliad are between zilch and none. The most they've read, judging from the flick, is the Clift Notes. And they didn't see anything wrong with just switching things around, you know--anyway, who'll know the difference?
Somehow I had the sneaking feeling that they were trying to make some Hollywood statement about the War on Terror but lacked the intelligence to pull it off or to understand that this was hardly the appropriate vehicle.
The real travesties are saved for the end--to keep people from walking out in the beginning.
In this version, Achilles hides in the horse with the footsoldiers--which is unlikely.
Priam--played quite well, as a matter of fact, by Peter O'Toole--is killed in the Temple of Zeus all right, but not in the horrifying manner of legend. You see, Andromache has escaped with Astyanax to Mount Ida.
But the real hack job comes when Briseis--yes, Briseis--beautifully cast as the beautifully beautiful Rose Byrne (she can't help it if these people slept through the Classics 101 lectures)...
In this version she's been elevated to a major character. She's not just Achilles' slave girl; she's his girlfriend--and Trojan royalty.
Anyway, she kills Agamemnon in the end.
No kidding. She really does.
She stabs him with a kife--not a two-headed axe, by the way.
I'm not kidding.
Nevermind Clytemnestra.
Nevermind the entire Oresteia.
Nevermind...
Oh just nevermind.
But if you insist on going to see this thing, don't say I didn't warn you.
And just be glad they didn't think to cast, say, Madonna or Barbra Streissand as Helen and The Three Stooges as the Achaean generals.
As a matter of fact, after I realized the mentality of the morons who made this movie, I was kinda looking forward to the food fight.
Your comment is so right. I will watch Pride and Prejudice if it's on but it drives me crazy that they're in Victorian, rather than Regency, garb. (No matter the drawbacks of the film, Lawrence Olivier was pretty darn hot in his young days.)
My wife said she saw Brad on Oprah, and Brad said they didn't change anything except leaving out the Gods.
*Sigh*.
Like a fool, I, too, decided to give it a chance.
They leave out Agamemnon's killing his own daughter. Menalaus and Agamemnon both die? Helen and Briseis get away!? Achilles actually makes it to the final scene? Achilles is a philosophical type who hates fighting?
And -- a 10 year war is collapsed into 2 weeks???
I am so completely, totally shocked. This is the worst hack-job on a story since Kevin Costner's Robin Hood. And this was such typical Hollywood PC stupidity:
Some day, one of these idiots is going to make a movie about WWII in which Hitler and Churchill meet and decide the entire war in a mano-a-mano fistfight.
And Hitler will win.