They have shorten the film already but I still found it dragging with some lengty pauses begging us to admire the sets design, CGI effects and Pitt's butt...ugh! 
avphile....i'll try to watch Helen of Troy and give it a try.... 
Do get a copy. They have their differences in so many aspects like character development and treatment. But I also have my reservations on the telemovie. For one thing, their Helen doesn't have the face that would launch a thousand ships in my book.
(But neither did the movie TROY)
The Iliad is such an epic story of literally mythical proportions that condensing it into one 2-hour+ movie won't do justice. The Iliad ends with Hector's funeral, the rest comes from Virgil's Aenid, if not mistaken. The filmakers should have taken a clue from LOTR and made a 2 or 3 part movie. They'll be labelled copycats for sure, but that's no shame in hollywood. Peter Jackson, where were you? They have aped the music of Gladiator and echoed smilarities with LOTR. They made the landing on TROY look like the storming of Normandy in Saving PRivate Ryan complete with a hail of arrows instead of bullets. They made the battle sequences look like those of ROTK with a scale that probably had no real historical precedence. So what's another part 2 or part 3 to complete the aping, if only to give depth and drama to the film adaptation. The filmakers made a film that purported to show the "real" events that may have created the myths. In the process, they ended up with a production that begs so much more to put it at par with the drama of their sources.
This film is really a Brad Pitt hollywood showcase. Much like Tom Cruise's Last Samurai. They both deliver epic scale to their utmost entertainment peaks (if not insult it, depending on your value.
) Entertaining, they are. Memorable, perhaps. But classic, they are not.
