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How does everyone feel about this film?  I personally like it although whenever I rewatch it I find myself fast forwarding through the tedious dialog into the battle scenes. 

Everynight before I turn in...in the dark quiet time after my wife goes to bed...I usually snack on carrots and cookies and watch a film espisodically.  Each viewing is the exact length of the snack consumption, around 25 to 30 minutes.  It creates this great 'serial' effect that makes for a good deal of anticipation, even for films I've seen before.(Actually Ive gotten pretty adept at spotting and selecting the perfect cliffhanger point in movies.)

Anyway..as of the last few days I'm actually working my way through the telefilm HELEN OF TROY from 2003.  I watched it when it ran on tv and was pretty impressed and now seeing it again after finally renting TROY last year, I gotta say...the telefilm was much better.

TROY suffers from what I call "too much"!  It tries to over-spectacle the audience and ends up having the rug pulled out from under it by some lame performances...notably Orlando Bloom.  As usual, it's littered with great character actors around the periphary, but the face time belongs to Brad Pitt, yawn! 

HELEN OF TROY knows it's budget is tight so it relies on strength of the actors to breathe life into the real point of the story...the soap-opera love triangle! 

Also Sienna Guillory makes for a great Helen.  At once childish and immature yet strikingly vulnerable then aware of the ridiculous lengths men will go to get what they want(she obviously read Lysistrata!), Guillory has the perfect young face to launch a thousand ships and also has a range of expressions and the ability to wield them beyond what I'm afraid Diane Kruger had.  I do like Kruger though, she was absolutely fantastic in JOYEUX NOEL.  I think in TROY, they just short-shrifted her.  Frankly, if it wasn't for the legend, I doubt the makers of TROY would have even bothered putting her in there in the first place.

TROY also suffers from a lack of a Cassandra.  The one portrayed in HELEN OF TROY is the nightmarish reality that Cassandra should be.

James Callus(lately familiar to everyone as Baltar in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) makes for a thoughtful Menelaus, while Rufus Sewell gives a pretty stark portrayal of Agememnon.

Yes(I hear the groans!)...Joe Montana is Achilles, but his non-nonsense presence makes Achilles the threat he should've been considered.  As opposed to the brooding Pitt, who (as in far too many of the films he does, I'm finding)is just being Brad Pitt.

I will concede that HELEN does have some extra advantage with more time to open up into.  The fringe elements of the "big story" are given great little lives by the likes Stellan Skarsgard(as Theseus) and great Brit character actor Jim Carter.

If you haven't checked it out, DarkSider, I urge to give it a shot.  If nothing else, it makes for a great compare-and-contrast experiment with the Petersen film.

I saw that one when it came out . . . the combat sequences were OK, but it didn't have nearly the power, depth, and beauty of "The 300".

 That movie ROCKED!!!!!!!!!!!

I enjoyed it, but I don't like the ending. That's because:

1) Troy falls but we fail to see that much. Just a fat man yelling "Burn Troy!", but not enough killing or fire.

2) So Ellen and Bloom get to live? After all the catastrophe they've caused? Oh, c'on.

I liked TROY (2004) and we saw it at the theater. The opening scene with the sword thrust on the giant was a great scene and I like the whole subject of the ancient world with the outfits. Would like to see HELEN OF TROY sometime.

(http://www.sacticket.com/static/movies/news/images/0509troy.jpg)

[youtube=425,350]http://youtube.com/watch?v=XpQJvWzpXjM&mode=related&search=

I think you've inspired me to check that one out.  See although I did like battle scenes in Troy the rest of the film just had this awfully wooden feel.  Even Peter O'Toole couldn't pull a good perfomance off dialog wise. 

I thought they changed too much from the Iliad.  They removed the element of the gods and all fantasy elements.  I think they were trying to make a realistic movie that was a social critique of the war in iraq.  They made it quite clear the greeks didn't really care about rescuing Helen and just wanted an excuse for conquest, similar to the pretext of the iraq war.  Yet, a movie like '300' is much more powerful, due to its dramatic and fantasy elements.  So, I think its first downfall was trying to make it realistic instead of what made the Iliad famous, its fantasy.

Second, as most of you pointed out the acting was horrible.  I think the best performance was by Peter O'toole as Priam.  Did any of the lead actors seem like dashing heroes of war that men would be willing to follow to their deaths?  I don't think so, which is why most of the action seems a little flat.

Well said.