Pitt pulls off epic tale

In his seminal work The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes theorised that when the events that the Homeric Iliad describes took place, the ancient Greeks literally heard the voices of their gods. Like schizophrenics, these bronze-age peoples had a tenuous grasp on the thinking "I" most of us take for granted; so, when the voices spoke to them in commanding tones, they obeyed. It's a bold theory, and helps to explain the particular way in which the ancient Greeks thought their deities were involved in initiating and partially controlling their actions.

In Troy, Wolfgang Petersen's epic recreation of The Iliad, the voices are out of the frame, and so are the gods. The director eschewed the divine origin and control of the Trojan war on the grounds that a modern audience would have been unable to suspend disbelief in it. If only he had read Jaynes - or just about any competent authority - Petersen could have found a way of suggesting the mental world of the period, without recourse to whitegirt hard bodies lobbing golden apples around the set. They spent $175 million making this flick: they could have at least put a classicist on the payroll.

Instead we get The Iliad for agnostics, and peopled by them as well. Agamemnon (Brian Cox) isn't a gods- fearing Mycenaean monarch, he's an abusive psychotherapist. When his brother Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) moans, "I want her back", with reference to his errant wife Helen (Diane Kruger), who has run off with Paris (ex-elf Orlando Bloom), Agamemnon savagely empathises, "Of course you do".

Paris himself is dealing with a bad case of sibling rivalry, fearing that he can never live up to his heman brother Hector (Eric Bana). Shagging Helen under her old man's nose and then taking her to Troy is just his way of getting his father's attention. Although why anyone would want pop-eyed Priam (Peter O'Toole suffering from an overdose of ham) to dote on them is beyond me. Of course, in the book of the film Paris has 60-odd brothers to compete with, as well as being exposed on a hillside as a baby, and still he doesn't end up quite such a wuss.

But Troy doesn't only star neurotics and agnostics. Achilles (Brad Pitt) is a nihilist-Buddhist, who speaks constantly of the inevitability of death and how he just wants to go with the flow. In one of the few lurches into theology allowed, he tells the captured Trojan princess Briseis (Rose Byrne): "The gods envy us because we are mortal." He goes on to equate the transience of experience with its inherent desirability. Oh, and while we're at it, he isn't a demigod, just a fabulously buff 40-year-old in a leather skirt.

He begins the film sleeping off a manwich situation with a couple of groupies in his yurt. Once he gets to Troy with his Myrmidons (a gang of 12th-century BC bikers-onfoothe takes time off from kickingass to love-up Briseis, and finally saves her from bad old Agamemnon (FRCPsych) as Troy is sacked.

Achilles's problem is that he's just too big for the ancient world. Like the portentous voiceover, and quite a lot of the other characters, he keeps having to remind us that his name will last for 3,200 years. But this is a tautological harping on of the first order; after all, if the fame of Hector, Paris et al hadn't lasted three millennia, we wouldn't be sitting in the multiplex in the first place.

WHAT Achilles needs is a good publ icist, the sort Warner Brothers had for this film. We hacks had to sign a confidentiality agreement before our screening and naturally our bags were searched for camcorders concealedin tiny wooden horses. But what could I have revealed prematurely about Troy that would have damaged the city-sized flick? " Trojan War Only Lasts for Two Months Instead of Ten Years" is a possible shocker, as is "Cassandra Written Out As Sooths No Longer Need to Be Said", or perhaps the producers feared "Troy Looks Like Enormous Garden Centre Complete With Water Feature".

Search me indeed. Actually, I didn't mind Troy that much; it may have been full of solecisms but they weren't screaming anachronisms. The script may have been wooden, but it wasn't wastepaper. Brad is worth the ticket price alone - the man is fit, no question - and others turned in creditable performances, particularly Eric Bana as an upright family man who just happens to be the prince of a warlike city-state, and Sean Bean as Odysseus the Ironic.

On the epic front this was up there with The Lord of the Rings, those armies of computergenerated hoplites stretched right out of sight - although not out of mind. Knowing that a spear man stands proxy for a dweeb with a graphics programme isn't quite the same as knowing that the producers had to go out and hire every out-of-work peasant they could lay their mitts on. Put simply, the days when epics were extra-intensive now belong to a mythic past.