Big (two hours, forty minutes) old-fashioned (not to say ancient) sword-and-sandal epic, complete with the traditional Cast of Thousands (however many of them may nowadays be computer-generated) and the mandatory Wooden Horse, plausible in its physical appearance if implausible in its placement at the foot of a downsloping sandy beach several miles from the city walls (why bother to lug it inside?). In basic outline a fairly straightforward illustration of events in The Iliad, or at any rate events on the human plane, it is all apt to seem terribly familiar to anyone who made a habit of actually reading his assigned reading in high school, regardless how long ago. Which is not to say it is all apt to seem terribly interesting. The casting of the movie, to begin with, can be said to be a little off when Achilles and Briseis (Brad Pitt and Rose Byrne) look prettier than Paris and Helen (Orlando Bloom and Diane Kruger, a Teutonic Ursula Andress type). Nor is it good storytelling to balance the legendary love that brought down an empire, and even to overbalance it, with a rival love whose only purpose is to flatter the movie's star. And not even his preludial one-on-one duel against a bald, multi-scarred, mountainous Goliath, and his zigzagging jump-and-stab maneuver in slow-motion, can convince us of Pitt's claim as the Greatest Living Warrior. A larger problem, though, seems to have to do with the aforementioned familiarity: the plainness, the bareness, the rudimentariness of the basic myth. Myth demands a bit of dressing-up if it wants to continue to turn heads in the modern world. (See what the Coen brothers did with The Odyssey in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) And it's not enough simply to instill the characters with a self-conscious, an unbecoming, an almost obnoxious certainty as to their own immortality and their place in history: "This war will never be forgotten, nor will the heroes who fight in it." They're right about that, but it's not for them to say. With Eric Bana, Brian Cox, Peter O'Toole, Sean Bean; directed by Wolfgang Petersen. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd