Troy

I don't see a reason to use spoiler tags. This story is tens of thousands of years old. If you don't know how it goes, I truly pity you. You'd be doing yourself a world of favor to read the greatest piece of ancient literature ever written.

But, for the sake of not "spoiling" the movie for you people... (I don't wanna use spoiler tags. They're ugly, and I've got way too much shit to post.)

This entire post contains "spoilers" beyond this point. Stop reading here if you don't want the movie "spoiled" for you.

This movie was phenomenal. Although, I've heard a lot of people complain about the follwing things.

1) The Gods weren't involved in the movie at all. Ares, Athena and Hera all involved themselves in the Trojan War extensively in the Iliad. Personally, I like the fact that the gods were left out. It was a more honest, more realistic interpretation of the story, Granted, Achilles tossing a spear one-hundred feet directly into a Trojan's sternum is pretty far-fetched, but not as far fetched as Achilles battling a living river.

2) The war only lasted a few days, whereas in the Iliad, it lasted ten years. Again, I really like this decision in the movie. Seriously, there's no way in hell a war of that scale could have lasted ten years. Look at how many people died in World War 2 (in infantry combat, not counting Hiroshima, Nagasaki or the firebombings) and that war lasted half of that timeframe. Can you truly expect that groutesque amount of human beings to sail from Greece to Troy at a constant enough rate to fill a ten year fracas?

3) A lot of characters got fucked with. Ajax wasn't supposed to die against Hector. He commited suicide after Achilles was defeated. Agammemnon was killed by his "wife", Clytemnestra after he returned to Greece once the war was over. Briseis was just an object, not Achilles' love. She was a trophy to him, nothing more. Again, I don't have too much of a problem with many of the changes. The movie would have felt awkward if they had waited until the end for Ajax to die. Agammemnon needed to be killed quickly. There wasn't enough time for an entire sequence devoted to him sailing back in victory and then being killed by his woman. Briseis was given character value in order to give Achilles character value. Without her, he would have been a much less likeable character in the movie, and with movie audiences these days, the crowd needs to like the character in order to feel the full weight of his death. People these days aren't capable of basing a character's value on much else.

I thought it was a fantastic movie. Achilles was portrayed perfectly in terms of his selishness, arrogance and combat badassitude. Agammemnon was spot-on, Hector was done very well, Paris was perfect (he was a spoiled pussy in the Iliad, and he was a spoiled pussy in Troy) and Odysseus was un-fucking-believable. If they don't do a movie-version of the Odyssey (starring Sean Bean as Odysseus, I won't accept anyone else) I'll be fucking murderous.