It took three movies to do justice to The Lord of the Rings, five (so far) to tell the tale of Star Wars, two to chronicle the demise of Tarantino’s Bill, and three, incredibly, to give us the Matrix saga, a saga with a concept, but no plot at all. In Wolfgang Petersen’s new Troy, by contrast, Homer’s Iliad, a story that has endured intact for 3,000 years, one of the glories, indeed, of Western culture (or, if you are the reviewer at the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard, “a dry classroom epic”), is sliced, diced, and distilled into blandness, all so [...]