I know, I know. I swore I would never lay out a dime for that piece of Hollywood crap. Piss on the Greek legends will they? Not on the backs of my hard earned dollars. Greek Mythology was one of a sparse few friends I had in High School. Should I support the Brad Pittizization of something I love?

But on the other hand, I admit I was curious. No, not to see Brad Pitt in a leather skirt. I’m not some pillow-biting queer.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. If that’s your thing, more power to you. I’ve lost count of the CD’s I’ve bought and movies I’ve gone to at the behest of my dick, drawn like a drowsing rod to the beckoning of a young woman I know I will never actually get to have sex with (or even see naked). You want to go and get off to Brad Pitt, be my guest.

No, I was curious the way I am curious about many of the Hollywood interpretations of the things I love. The Hulk. The Punisher. Elektra. Constantine. I know they will not live up to my expectations. I know they will not do justice to the things I love. Sometimes they get lucky, as with X-Men, or Spider-man, and invest enough in the movie to have a competent director and writers create a true vision, but more often we get Daredevil, a mis-cast steaming turd of a movie that finds those very things that make the characters special and either excises them entirely or violates them thoroughly.

And then I’m sad.

So I’ve started avoiding these movies as a defense mechanism. If I don’t support it, it will go away, right? That’s how capitalism works, no? I’ve developed a good ’spider-sense’ for which movie is which. If my suck-sensors bleep, you can’t drag me to the theater.

But like I said, I’m curious. So when I get a chance to see one of these movies for free, well, that’s another story. I watched Daredevil on HBO/TiVo, and knowing that I had not directly supported it, I was able to give it a fair shot before buzzing through the rest of that doo-doo.

As with Troy. A friend of mine bought it (for which I mocked him appropriately), and offered to lend it to me, free of charge. He claimed I wasn’t giving it a fair shot, and that if I didn’t take it too seriously, I would enjoy it.

My curiosity got the better of me. I’ve got 2:40 to kill somewhere along the line, right? So I took it. And I watched it tonight. And you know what?

It wasn’t half-bad.

The movie looked very fake to me. That overused scene with all the boats might as well have been turds floating in a bathtub with handkerchiefs on sticks stuck in them. I thought the Greek Isles looked suspiciously like a movie set, and I could just imagine the refreshment table piled with donuts and Snapple right on the other side of the pillar.

Rather than let that bother me, I just switched my perspective a bit. This isn’t really happening, I told myself. You’re just watching a play about the fall of Troy.

It’s a different form of suspension of disbelief. A good movie will make you feel like what you’re watching is REAL in a way that a play doesn’t. At a play, part of you is always aware that you’re not really in the place the three stage-props tell you you are.

In that perspective, the movie was just fine. Nothing amazing. Nothing award-worthy. But solid.

Some things I liked:

* The excision of the divine: This was a masterful decision, I thought. It took a movie in danger of becoming Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, and made it into something at least pseudo-serious.

All those old stories are so wrapped up in religion that you sometimes forget it is about PEOPLE. Without Aphrodite telling Paris to do this and Apollo telling Agamemnon to do that, you can see the very real and human motiviations that explained every action.

This was what Greek Mythology was all about. Hell, it’s what religion is all about. People do great deeds, and they get embellished over and over in the retelling, until they achieve a divine status. A story about how Achilles was fearless and undefeated in battle until he was found dead with an arrow in his heel suddenly becomes a whole rigamarole about his mother being a goddess and dipping him by the ankle in the river Styx (or was it honey-mustard sauce?).

Religion is always based in bullshit like this, and no matter how many times you offer rational explanations for things, there will always be suckers who believe it.

* The Loyalty to Homer: Despite the removal of the gods and proof of the divine, and the removal of the majority of the rituals described in GREAT detail in The Iliad, the story stays surprisingly close to the myth. Even without Hermes zipping around mucking things up, I knew everything that was going to happen before it happened. Sure, they enhanced a romance here or an offense there to make the story flow more smoothly, but for the most part, those liberties were more probable than a contest over a golden apple, or a human sacrifice that brings back the wind.

If the battle of Troy really happened, as many historians seem to think, then I would bet this is a closer account that what Homer wrote.

* The Theme of Deeds to Remember: This was before blogging. Before libraries and television. Shit, it was before paper. The only way to be remembered longer than the lifespan of those who knew you was to do or dare something so great that it would make it into one of the great stories told around the fire, passed on from generation to generation, poet to minstrel to storyteller to wise man to priest. Do something so impressive that you attach your name to religion, and it will last forever.

All the characters in the movie, save perhaps Odysseus, seem driven by this theme. It is the source of the angst between Achilles and Agamemmnon, and this again is right out of the source material.

* The Battle Scenes: I am a fan of sword and armor whoop-ass as much as the next guy, and this movie had it in spades. Every once in a while, it looked overly fake, but just as often, it was masterfully choreographed, with sound and gore and viscerality more than you would expect from your Hollywood fat cats.

So maybe the armor was historically inaccurate, and the Greeks were also a lot gayer and pedophilic. So what? I don’t really want to see a movie full of oiled men running around naked with their dicks swinging, wearing in most cases nothing more than a helmet, a cape, and some shin guards. (And that’s not even getting into the gay, pedophilic part, believe it or not.)

The actors were too pretty to play warriors? Sure, I guess, but again, the source material holds sway. Achilles and Paris in The Iliad are described as having near-inhuman beauty. Why not have Hollywood prettyboys play them?

And the love scenes and emotional bits were tear-jerky and overdone. No argument. Drama is always overdone in a play, and I can live with that.

So, my mini-review is this: If you can just imagine that this is Brad Pitt and his friends putting on a play about the fall of Troy, you will have a good time. If you try and take it too seriously, you will be severely disappointed.