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| Spanning three countries, five months of shooting and a $200 million budget, Troy is the gamble of Hollywood's summer. The 2½ hour epic, which opens Friday, will test not only the audiences' love of the 2,800-year-old story The Iliad. Troy will measure Brad Pitt's star power, Orlando Bloom's staying power and the box office prospects for a summer sorely in need of an original hit. USA TODAY's Scott Bowles takes a look at what's at stake for the players behind the most anticipated movie of the season. <<snip>> If anyone would survive a non-successful Troy, it would be Bloom. With his turns as Legolas in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and swashbuckler Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean, Bloom has the least to lose in this epic, in which he plays Trojan prince Paris. "He's got four films under his belt that have made more than $200 million," says Robert Bucksbaum of tracking firm ReelSource. "No matter what happens, he'll still be the hottest actor going right now." |
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| In 1871, a German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann began excavating a 5-acre mound in Turkey called Hisarlik that he later reported was Homer's "mighty-walled Troy." Now under excavation by the Project Troia team led by Germany's University of Tubingen and the University of Cincinnati, the mound overlooks the Dardanelles straits linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, matching Homer's descriptions. |
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| Paris is no match for the brawny and infuriated Menelaus. Helen claims not to care about Paris' cowardice — in the Iliad, Helen comes to loathe Paris, but in this interpretation they stay devoted lovers — but it has serious implications for Hector (Eric Bana), who jumps to his brother's defense. |