] It's not that "Troy" is a bad movie. It's a good movie --
] if you don't care about Homer. It could have been a great
] movie if the people who created it cared about the power
] of this fantastic tale.
]
] But they decided to make a movie like every other movie.
] And that's what they got.

[ Not a ringing endorsement. I'm a lot more likely to accept generic movies if they came straight from a screenwriters head, or from the mass-market fiction that pervades bookstores, which is itself already generic (by which I don't claim to deny it's entertainment value).

I'm a little sensitive to ruination of classic stories, for the very reasons outlined in this article. I support modernizations (a glut of which were made a few years ago, with somewhat varied results) and even reinterpretations, but something about purporting to tell one story, and then changing it with no warning strikes me as unsavory. Movies are so popular, and so widely viewed, I worry about them becoming the definitive version of a story. Am I just being an academic elitist here, or is this a shared concern (beyond the author of this review, who i'd guess agrees with me)?

Followup: Does it matter if the derivative work isn't obviously connected with the original source? Does the sin still occur if only the experts can see the connection? -k]