Troy – if not for Brad Pitt, this would have been completely in the pits, truly pitiful; Brad mimics Brando with his swagger and rebelliousness as Achilles, particularly sounding like Marlon screaming for Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire when Achilles cries for Hector (Eric Bana who starred in Munich) to come outside the walls to fight.

The Trojan War has been compressed from ten years down to a few weeks in this uninspired version of The Iliad in which the gods and goddesses play almost no role and Agamemnon dies at the hand of the Trojan maiden Briseis rather than after the war when he returns to his wife Clytemnestra, thus eliminating Zeus’s curse and the story of Orestes’s dilemma and so much more; a few weeks later we watched on PBS a two-hour BBC production Helen of Troy hosted by Bettany Hughes, fascinating and informative; another terrific PBS series from the BBC in the early ‘80s was Michael Wood’s In Search of the Trojan War.

Click here for links to places to buy or rent this movie in video and/or DVD format, or to buy the soundtrack, posters, books, even used videos, games, electronics and lots of other stuff. I suggest you shop at least two of these places before buying anything. Prices seem to vary continuously. For more information on this film, click on this link to The Internet Movie Database. Type in the name of the movie in the search box and press enter. You will be able to find background information on the film, the actors, and links to much more information.

Copyright © 2006 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Patrick Ivers can be reached via e-mail at .