A milquetoast Paris and a drippy Helen are not really the center of this movie. However, they should have been given that they are the catalysts for all the action following their running away together - from her husband. The eventual hard earned respect in the combative relationship between Achilles and Hector must suffice to compensate for the lackluster love story. Nevertheless, all the performers are simply overwhelmed by the sumptuous production design allied to the fact that their characters are weakly written and blandly performed, anyway, because there is a hell of lot of miscasting going on here.
The morbid pontificating on loyalty, self respect and honor leads to no abundant understanding of the nature of these human qualities. Achilles is a classic anti hero who finds himself lumbered with his inferiors because he has few equals. He possesses no true loyalty and so is essentially self serving and neurotic: One longs for his death while admiring his fearsome martial skills. His glory is bound up with his inevitable doom since he fights for the sake of fighting as well as to prove that personal allegiances are meaningless. Yet, without loyalty, there is no honor and without a full exploration of dramatic themes there is no real drama.
HOMER would have hated it.
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