Well, it didn’t completely suck. Visually beautiful, great cast… I love John Rhys-Davies in just about anything, and Sienna Guillory is the first woman who I could actually call a golden beauty with a straight face. (And I’d love to see her do Richard Adam’s Maia… but that’s another entry.)

Well, that was a recounting of the good. On to the bad, the ugly, and the just plain cheesy.

Way too many modern sensibilities get interjected into a story which is anything but modern in it’s morals, sensibilities, or anything else. It’s a story about order versus chaos, gods versus gods with humanity as both the playing board and the pieces, and love merely another way for fate to move us all over to where it wants us to be. Remolding this epic into a bronze age Romeo and Juliet makes me want to spit.

No mention of Brisis or Achilles sulking, no Patroclus… (that whole big gay thing too complicated? Though other than that I did like the crazy angle they went with on him.) Odysseus gets a few good lines but I want to know how in *hell* he knew about the suitors and the weaving gambit. (Let’s not forget, it will be another ten years before *he* gets home.)

Another seriously off point - far as I can tell, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon while he’s still in Troy. Did the book manage to fall in a blender while I wasn’t looking? Did she hop a ship sometime in year nine? Bleah.

At the end of the four hours, I’ve seen a lot of eye candy, some decent acting, and an adaption so pedestrian that I’m tempted to run away to an ivory tower, stick my fingers in my ears, and give a rousing chorus of “la la la I can’t hear you”