No, not my kid brother. The movie, with Brad Pitt. Watched it over the weekend.

I thought it was a good film, and if you're not one of those movie viewers who's looking for the film to mirror the original story, you'll probably like it, too. Much is changed for the telling and time limitations of a film. The crux is there, and the cinematography is decent. The costumes are colorful, and the characters are fairly well represented and acted. There's the obvious misunderstandings and shallow wrongdoings that motivate the characters, but movies are made for the masses, and can't be too complex. Nothing horribly unbelievable happens, and all of the characters seem to maintain themselves throughout.

I remember the tales, as I think most of us do, from our trivial studies of Greek mythology in school. I say trivial because while it may have seemed horribly important at the time, it wasn't very deep, even compared to some of the Discovery Channel shows I've watched since.

"History" aside, the movie was entertaining. Taken with the basics of the myth, and the presence of some of the heroes, the story had some creative twists, all, I'm sure, with the compression of time to think of.

A story from the ancient Iliad, the basics are that Paris (Orlando Bloom), a prince of the city-state Troy, woos or kidnaps Helen (Diane Kruger), queen of Sparta. Menelaus (Brendon Gleeson), king of Sparta and husband of Helen, with the help of his brother, Agamemnon (Brian Cox), king of Athens and all of Greece, and an army of 1,000 ships, attacks Troy in an effort to get her back. All of the heroes and gods are brought into the battle, many of whom loose their lives. Of course, this is where "the face that launched a thousand ships" comes from, and where we get the Trojan horse.

In the Iliad the war takes ten years to fight. It's the greatest war man ever fights. In the movie, it's left vague, but it seems to be a matter of weeks. Of course, for us it was only a few hours...

There are a great many characters from the myth that hit the screen, like the giant Ajax (Tyler Mane) with his powerful hammer, the Trojan prince brothers Paris and Hector (Eric Bana), and, of course, the star warrior Achilles (Pitt) and his band of mercenaries. Unlike the whole mythology story, the heroes are there at the behest of their king; if I recall the mythology, they're all after Helen for their own purposes...

A lot of sword combat ensues, in a lot of quick and dirty fights. Some of the clashes were dramatic and huge, and some, were hard to comprehend in the big picture.

In one of these clashes, Hector believes he's fighting Achilles. During the fight, all of the forces around them stop to watch. It seems that all of the forces stop to watch. When Hector wins the battle, but finds it isn't Achilles, but someone else in his armour, they call it a day, and everyone just goes home.

Shortly following, Achilles challenges Hector to a duel for revenge. The battle ensues is very well orchestrated, and shows the warriors are both substantial. We get a glimpse of the indestructible Achilles; only one blow is landed, and that against his chest armor, producing only a scrape. One of the bits of mythology that got touched on was that Achilles was not truly impenetrable, but instead had some early iron armor; everyone else wore leather or bronze. At one point earlier, a messenger boy asks if he's truly impervious to harm, to which Pitt reponds that would make his shield unnecessary.

In the scope of a film, sure, you can allow for the focus on a minor battle, but there was a lot of assumptions that had to be made based on comments of the characters about the flow of the war. The film, for example, showed a few hardy clashes between the Greeks and Trojans, but made it seem as though these few give-and-take skirmishes (in which the Greeks seemed to take the greater losses) were all that the war consisted of.

In the end, of course, Troy is sacked when they are led to believe that the Greeks have all left overnight, leaving behind a giant horse as an offering to Posideon, the god overseeing the oceans. A few dead bodies, apparently with the plague, some debris and burned ships are all that remain. In an odd spirit of comradery, the Trojans pull the giant wooden statue into their city, to be put in the garden for more god-appeasing power. A kind of stupid "thank you" for giving them the victory.

As we all know, some Greeks pop out of the horse overnight, after the Trojans all pass out from their victory party, over come the sleeping gate guards and they let the rest of the Greek army in. Troy is burned to the ground. Some of the heroes and heroines we like make their last stands or get away, in the appropriate manner.

Our movie's hero, Achilles, falls, as we know, by an arrow through the tendon that's named after him. That's where his mom held him as she dipped him in the river Styx; apparently she'd never thought to double-dip him, or shift her grip to make sure he was completely covered. Once hit, he looses his mojo and takes a few arrows and dies. This counters the argument that the armor is what made him great as he's shot clean through it, indicating that his magic, god-given power has been defeated, not his armor.

What Paris, who shot him in the film, doesn't know, is that he was searching for his new found love, Paris' cousin Polydora (Siri Svegler). A twist, I think, added for the film, to give some love interest that didn't turn Helen into the tramp she was.