Troy on the down side:

downside the first-
this movie was very long. the internet claims 165 minutes, but I am frantically searching my pockets because I'm pretty sure that I lost more than $2.75 in Hour-Dollars on this one. here's one big problem with making a movie out of the Iliad: The Iliad is long as all get out. if you wrote each word in the text of the Iliad from end to end on one strip of paper, that paper would reach all the way to the moon and back 3,175.6 times and weigh over a hundred thousand million pounds. because it's just that long. not deal-breakingly, soul-crushingly long necessarily. but I am more tired than I would like to be for having just sat still for two and three quarter hours.

downside the second-
according to this movie, Achilles and Patroclus were cousins. cousins? come on. now, I understand that certain concessions have to be made to the mindset of the average American moviegoer. and I suppose that if the average American were presented with these facts:
fact one- Achilles is a masculine kind of guy, a.k.a. a heartless (angry) killer,
fact two- Achilles is definitely into having his way with women,
fact three- Achilles is also definitely into having his way with men,
the average American's head would probably explode. so they turned Achilles and Patroclus from "really good friends" (if you know what I mean) into cousins instead. that seems like kind of a cop-out to me. because as fun as it was to joke about what it means to be "Greek cousins" with somebody during the movie, I feel like the makers of the film probably could have just owned up to the fact that the ancient Greeks made their way through their world killing everything they could and having sex with everything they couldn't. or was it the other way around?

downside the third-
despite the movie being longer (and the cast more distinguished) than the list of asses I kissed to get in here, they still felt a duty to cram in a whole bunch of plot from pretty much every story about the ancient Greeks you could come up with. they weren't just making a movie out of the Iliad. and that's fine. but as long as they were going to add in extras like the Trojan horse, Achilles' death, and Aeneas's departure for parts unknown, the least they could have done was include some material from Xenophon's Anabasis. it would have been nice to get a shot of Brad Pitt racing his chariot around Troy, clinking three bottles together on his fingers, crying "Tro-jans, come out and pla-a-a-y..."

downside the fourth-
despite claims to the contrary by representatives of Team Fabulous, Helen's face would not have launched a thousand ships. neither would her backside. I respect the decision to go with a no-name actress in place of a famous one for the role, but I'm pretty sure Will Turner could have done better. as far as I'm concerned, she launches 200 ships, tops. and definitely not my best 200.

Troy on the up side (because there's two sides to every schwartz):

upside the first-
Brad Pitt kills a lot of people in this movie; fewer than you expect, but more than you realize. the long-anticipated Tyler Derden - The Hulk main event does not disappoint, preceeded as it is by the anticlimactic Legolas v. Hamish and altogether-too-short Sabretooth v. The Hulk undercards. also, did you know that the ancient Greeks invented wire-work? and for all these years I always thought it was John Woo. shows what I know.

upside the second-
this movie stays relatively faithful to its principles of not taking definitive sides between the Greeks and the Trojans. it's clear from the beginning that Agamemnon is a power-hungry lunatic, but everyone in the film comes off as human enough to be relatively interesting. maybe not 165 minutes interesting, if you know what I mean, but they held my attention solid for a good 130 to 140 minutes.

upside the third-
Boromir (my runaway Lord of the Rings favorite character) makes a strong showing as Odysseus/Ulysses (easily my favorite of the Greeks both in and out of this movie). I am not ashamed to admit that this makes me an enormous dork. and yet it seems that I am only 32.50% dork. how is this possible?

Troy was an okay movie. I won't tell you to see it, but I won't tell you not to, either. if you happen to have 3 hours to waste and $6-9 to blow perhaps it'll be worth it. or perhaps not. this is the best movie that I have seen recently, but given that the rest of them caused various degrees of stultification and soul-death that isn't really saying much in the endorsement department. it's a little like what Jeff Van Gundy was saying about being the best looking Van Gundy in that respect.