I saw this in the cinema and liked it, but then liked it more when I saw it again after I'd read Homer's the Iliad and the Odyssey. The gods and goddesses are less evident in the movie, but as brilliant as the Iliad is, I wasn't keen when a battle would be fought and "Athena pulled So-and-So" from the battle, a euphemism for So-and-So running like a coward. The acting was generally good, although Brad Pitt can be summed up in Peter O'Toole's summation, "A fair actor and a fine young man." And, as Christopher Marlowe famously wrote: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Illium/Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss..." Well, as pretty as Diane Kruger is, they should've cast a stunner (I watched some Hitchcock recently and they needed an actress at the beauty level of a Tippi Hedren or a Grace Kelly). Incidentally, Kruger knocked Peter O'Toole's behavior, but Eric Bana said that, when filming the scene where he says a last good-bye to O'Toole (son-to-father in the movie), he barely had to act because he regarded O'Toole so highly it was indeed sad for him to say good-bye to O'Toole, even when just acting it in a scene. O'Toole knocked Wolfgang Petersen's direction, but I've read the first volume of O'Toole's memoirs, which is largely a memoir of the horrors of the Germans bombing O'Toole's home in England during WW II when he was a kid, and it's possible that O'Toole wasn't altogether nice to Petersen and Kruger (both Germans) because of an enduring grudge, and was wonderful toward (Australian) Bana. A little tip for those who haven't read Homer's works: as I got toward the end of the Iliad, I kept waiting for the Trojan Horse, and it never appeared (I wish I'd known). Only when I next read the Odyssey did I see that that scene is rendered in a conversational recollection.
