My rating: Well Worth the Watch

It's time for me to come to terms with something: I'm a big sucker for the grandiose. Films that follow the standard of Braveheart and have big sweeping battle scenes, huge armies, and take great pains to look historical, I'm gonna like those movies every time. That being known, you can expect that this flick would make it onto my review with gusto.

Fans of Braveheart will be doing somersaults in the aisles. It's so close to the feel of that movie, the ties are undeniable. Throw in the fact that Brandon Gleeson, who played Hamish in Braveheart, and the guy who played his father are both in this movie, and it's almost a dream come true for folks like myself who have actually owned the movie on both VHS and DVD, and worn it out on both formats.

The battle scenes absolutely make the movie. Make no mistake, the acting is good too... in spite of the shelling that Orlando Bloom and Brad Pitt have taken from other reviewers for being "pretty boys," I think both did fantastic jobs. Especially Bloom. His portrayal of Paris was very authentic, and while not an Oscar-worthy performance, definitely was intriguing.

Eric Bana redeems the horrible travesty of his role in Hulk and delivers the role of Hector, who I must say was my favorite character. Peter O'Toole was also, as always, dead-on. Sean Bean made a tiny appearance as the legendary Odyssesus, a role that I thought they wasted on him. Why get such a great actor to play such a small role? Oh well... did I say that the battle scenes made the movie?

This film made me quit trying to figure out which scenes were digital and which ones were real and just watch. Of course, with (if I remember correctly) close to ten separate scenes of battle, that's a lot to keep up with anyway. It never got old, though... director Wolfgang Peterson interspersed some fantastic one-on-one action so that your eyes didn't get too tired from watching ten thousand guys hack at one another.

Peterson did something else here that I thought was really original, and made the movie more real. He left out the gods. I don't mean they were't mentioned... Priam was all over Apollo, and Agamemnon appealed to Zeus. We just never SEE them. That's something that's always made me tired about movies adapted from mythology... movie makers feel like they have to show the gods in person. In this case, Wolfgang Peterson said that doing such a thing would be "silly..." and I think the result was much more believable. I suspect that he may have theorized (as I would) that the actions of these gods were the explanation ancient Greeks gave for the things that happened to them, and moved on to create a much more possible story. I especially found interesting the explanation for Achilles' only being able to be killed by being shot in the heel.

I won't give away the ending, but I'll say I had mixed emotions about it. You find yourself very much liking the characters on both sides of the battle, not wanting to see any of them killed. I had read the story of the Trojan War a dozen times when I was a kid, but to see these characters brought to life the way they were here was a different angle on the dusty old book written by Homer. It was like hearing the story for the first time.

It's not a film for Heather, the battle scenes get intense at times, and there are a lot of them. If you can't take stuff like that, you might want to go see 13 Going on 30 instead. That's where Heather was when I watched this one.