Coming Attractions

By RICHARD CORLISS

Two Great Nations At War over a Woman. How Can It Fail?

Hollywood would probably define an epic as a war movie for kids, in three or more installments. But before The Lord of the Rings, before Star Wars and Star Trek--nearly three millenniums before--a blind bard named Homer sang of an Olympian spat and the decade-long battle it stoked between the great, ancient civilizations of Greece and Troy.

Wolfgang Petersen, the German director who has won worldwide audiences for manly crises under the water (Das Boot), on its roiling surface (The Perfect Storm) and in the sky (Air Force One), wants to take The Iliad out of schoolroom memories. His notion is to vacuum off the cobwebs and make it a vivid adventure that will appeal equally to adults who have a yawning familiarity with the story and to children for whom Homer is only Bart's bald, dundering dad.

Considering the saga's seminal literary importance, not to mention all the stuff that blows up, it's surprising that so few filmmakers have itched to put it on the screen. And when they do, it is usually The Odyssey they turn to. That picaresque travelogue through the wilder outposts of ancient Greece has inspired ordinary films (Kirk Douglas in a mid-'50s Ulysses), funny ones (the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?) and one masterpiece (Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze, a mesmeric synopsis of a century of Greek history). But where's The Iliad? Hard to find, except in the 1956 Helen of Troy, a sober retelling from the Trojans' point of view.

It is too early to know whether Petersen and the screenwriter, novelist David Benioff (25th Hour), will be partisan or neutral. But Troy is bound to be handsome. The cinematographer is Roger Pratt, who shot Brazil and Batman in the '80s and gave a nicely sepulchral tone to last year's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. And heading the cast is a tony quartet of hunks: Brad Pitt as Achilles, Eric Bana (who somehow survived the wreck of The Hulk) as Hector, Sean Bean (Boromir in The Lord of the Rings) as Odysseus and Orlando Bloom (who was Tolkien's elf lord Legolas and Johnny Depp's young foil in Pirates of the Caribbean) as that thieving scamp Paris. And in the role of Priam, King of Troy, is Peter O'Toole, 40 years and more after incarnating the movies' great idealist lost in war, Lawrence of Arabia.

Any film production is controlled chaos, and Troy (whose reported budget is an epic $145 million) is no exception. Early this year, as the Iraq war approached, the production judiciously moved from Morocco to Baja California. On the Malta location this spring, severe heat brought fainting spells on many of the burly Bulgarians hired as extras. One bit player, a former Mr. Malta named George Camilleri, suffered a leg wound while jumping from a galleon and died a few weeks later.

For the principals, Troy has been arduous but rewarding. "It's like going to the acting doctor," Bana told TIME while on set in Malta, "and hearing him say, 'This is exactly what you need.' I've never had so much fun on a shoot before."

By themselves, blood, sweat and fun don't make a good movie. Vision does. When Troy opens next May 21, we'll see if Homer's vision came through Petersen's viewfinder to create a genuine, grownup flesh-and-brains epic.