I saw this piece of cr*p last night on TV. My jaw dropped during a scene where Paris and Menelaus basically mend their wounds together after a failed duel while bitching about Agamemnon. This is so far removed from the spirit of Homer's characters, I could have screamed! What is this, I thought? "Days of our Lives"?

I was equally appalled by the numerous uncalled-for scenes of torture, violence, sadism, gore, nudity, soft-core porn and violent sexual content, none of which are even remotely present or suggested in Homer. This is Greek mythology for the troubled, the uninformed, the blighted, the poor in spirit and the ignorant.

This is all the more troubling as this mini-series has the same name as Robert Wise's unqualified masterpiece, which is rarely shown nowadays and probably never will be again, after this one gave it the kiss of death.

King Priam has a son Paris born to him. Cassandra prophecies that he would cause the end of Troy. The King leaves him on Mount Ida to die but he is found and raised by shepherd Agelaus. As an adult, he is asked to judge the beauty of Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. He chooses Aphrodite and she awards him the love of Helen of Sparta. Mycenaean King Agamemnon is also taken with Helen. Helen is kidnapped by Athenians Theseus and Pirithous. Her brother Pollux rescues her but is killed in the process. Helen's father Tyndareus, King of Sparta, blames her for his favorite son's death and decides to marry his cursed daughter off. The suitors swear an oath to unite for war against any who goes against the eventual husband's claim.

It's a functional production considering the lower budget than a theatrical movie. It's well made for a TV miniseries. The longer running time also allows the story to have more complexity. There are some compelling actors here. Sienna Guillory is a competent actress although the role of Helen of Troy is a tall order as the most beautiful woman in the world. The battle of Troy has competent CGI. It's as big as can be expected under the circumstances.

The story is pretty well known, at least in some sectors of social space, so I'll just make some observations as I watch this longish version through.

Briefly: It's about 1200 BC. Paris, a young man of Troy, falls in love with, Helen, the wife of a Greek king and runs off with her to his home. This annoys the Greeks. They launch a thousand ships and wage a ten-year war against the walls of Troy. The Trojan forces include the noble Hector. The Greeks have Achilles and the wily Odysseus. The war is brutal but finally ends, although the in-family tsuris persists through the post-war period.

First, half an hour in, I haven't seen anything in the wardrobe or weapons that was disturbing but I'm not a historian. True, some of the armor looks left over from a movie about the Roman Empire, and in battle the swords don't look like Greek choppers but like the Roman gladius, but it doesn't poison the story. What I definitely could not wrap my head around was Achilles -- a muscle-bound, bald-headed street thug who would have fit very well into one of Cinecitta's sword-and-sandal epics starring Steve Reeves from the 1950s or, better yet, into a modern urban action movie. All that's missing are the barbed wire tattoos. There have been complaints that it wanders too far from Homer's original but so far it resembles the original story, at least the translation I read years ago. I doubt anyone know what the ACTUAL original was like. Homer's version was written down hundreds of years after the event. And I understand it was all memorized oral folklore. The iambic pentameter was a mnemonic device. If the orator screwed up the meter he'd know he'd made a mistake, but it's easy to imagine that improvisation to bring back order was a common event. I doubt that Homer hewed to closely to the hundreds-of-year-old original tale, but then there might not have been that much left for Homer to hew to.

At least this one has the gods and goddesses mucking around with things, although not much. Paris gets the golden apple for choosing Aphrodite as the most beautiful of three competing contestants, and she backs Paris in the Trojan War. Next time he should be a bit more pragmatic and choose Athena. Even if she had a face like the rear end of an International eighteen wheeler, she knows about war. Nothing here though about Aphrodite back Troy in the war. There are also complaints about Helen not being worth a war because she's not as bewitchingly desirable as she should be, but in my opinion she looks just fine and would do in a pinch. She's spirited, slender and blond, with a piping voice, a la gamin, and looks vaguely French. If you watch it, you'll see what I mean.

I have no memory of Paris on his first visit to Troy being pitted in games against the finest Trojan warriors. (He beats Hector in a knife fight in the arena.) Maybe the scenes were added to juice up the story with more action and to turn Paris into more of a hero, or it may be that my brain is turning to tofu, in which case I will leave it for analysis to the American Culinary Institute. I don't recall that Helen was first kidnapped by the agents of one of the Greek kings either. It looks like padding. But the honorable kidnapper is played by Stellan Skarsgaard whose work I've always admired, whether his character is good or evil. The other performers who stand out are John Rhys-Davies as King Pryam, James Callis as the sneaky Agamemnon, and Rufus Sewell as the honest Menelaus.

In the end, only the bare bones of the original remain. We hardly see Odysseus. There is no Patroclus. Achilles never has a hissy fit over his girl friend being taken away. But there IS the Trojan Horse, Achilles dragging Hector's body around the walls of Troy, Paris killing Achilles with an arrow to the heel, and Cassandra's prophecies being realized. A revenge incident is tacked on at the end to provide a sense of justice prevailing. The underhanded Agamemnon is murdered in his bath by his jealous wife, Clytemnestra. But that's from a different play altogether. It's like taking a shoe horn and working the Doolittle raid into the climax of the wretched "Pearl Harbor," only there to provide a feeling of justice having been done.

I kind of enjoyed it. The production values are high, the use of CGIs is modest and effective, the photography isn't too gloomy or in high contrast or tinted a ghoulish green, and the editing is sane and classical instead of lightning fast and disorienting. It's a sad story but a very human one. The only characters with truly out-sized flaws are Agamemnon and Achilles. All the other characters are shown as admirable in some way, or at least understandable.