Hello, all! Just got back from seeing TROY with my goddaughter Charlotte. It's long, it's got several good performances, and it plays fast and loose with the various legends of the Trojan War (no 10 years here, maybe 10 weeks!), but I still enjoyed it, perhaps not as much as the Robert Wise version from the 1950s. I really enjoyed Eric Bana, Peter O'Toole, Sean Bean, and Brad Pitt, but I missed several essential characters like Cassandra, Hecuba, other princes of Troy (Priam had 50 children!) like Troilus and Aeneas, who pops up at the end as a nobody who suddenly has greatness thrust upon him.
Briseis' character, the love of Achilles, is a combo of the ILIAD's Briseis and the Trojan princess in one of the Troy legends, set up as a peace marriage between her and Achilles, and Patroclus is not more than a friend as Shakespeare made clear in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA. I thought the director and writer - although I'll never know what he originally intended - made a bit about the parallels between Iraq and Troy but totally ignored the horror of the aftermath, from Cassandra's death as a concubine of Agamemnon or the great emotional upheaval of Euripides' TROJAN WOMEN. Someday, although I doubt any budget could stand it, I wish we'd get a better overview of the Trojan War from the judgment of Paris through the disbursement of the Greeks afterwards, maybe including the 10 years' wandering of Odysseus. Dramatically, I think the best plays about the war are TROILUS AND CRESSIDA (Fry, lechery!) and TROJAN WOMEN.
I also missed the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis, lured there by a supposed marriage to Achilles and killed by her screwed-up father to promote a war (I could see George W doing that!), and I missed some humor, which is very abundant in the ILIAD, especially when Hera seduces Zeus so the Greeks can get some wins in while Achilles sulks.
Sword and sandal beefcake fans will love the bare chests, and Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom have some rather revealing moments as well. However, the women don't!