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In another timeline, we would’ve gotten the first true blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey about 20 years ago, probably starring Sean Bean—one of the all-time great swords-and-sandal character actors (shout out Boromir, shout out Ned Stark)—as the titular journeyman. Alas, that wasn’t the will of the [Hollywood] gods. Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, a loose adaptation of the Illiad with Bean in a supporting role as Odysseus alongside Brad Pitt’s Achilles, was a commercial hit—one of the highest-grossing films of 2004, in fact—but the reviews were so tepid that everyone involved seems to have pretty much washed their hands of the project, dried them on some loose bills from that half-billion-dollar haul, and moved on. If the reception had been better, I’m almost certain some exec would have cracked the Sparknotes on Homer’s epic and got to work developing The Odyssey as a spinoff for Bean’s Odysseus.

The story of Troy’s development is a lowkey Sliding Doors moment for Hollywood that could have drastically altered the blockbuster landscape as we know it had it gone any differently. Petersen, as it happens, only came to Troy after a pretty mid-sounding Batman vs. Superman project he was attached to got canned; when he became available for Troy, Warner Bros. reportedly booted that film’s original director—one Christopher Nolan—off the project. The movie they gave him as a consolation prize? Batman Begins.

The rest is history—but in that history, Troy itself has become kind of a footnote, especially now that Nolan’s The Odyssey is on track to make a trillion dollars and win a hundred Oscars. Petersen’s film is, comparatively, a blip in the aughts-movie annals that critics, audiences and even some of its own cast even shrug and wince at. It’s understandable, but it’s also too bad, because in my opinion, Troy is and always has been a flawed but pretty fun time at the movies.

I saw Troy in theaters when I was still a pre-teen, with my aunt and uncle Curtis (one of formative pop culture senseis) at whatever the Battery Park movie theater was called before Regal swooped in, and I dug it. In the ensuing years, I’ve developed a frontal lobe (and the elite, discerning taste that powers this column) but I’ve never switched up on Troy. I’ve rewatched it a few times over the years, I cued it up again last year when Nolan’s Odyssey was first announced, and recently, after seeing The Odyssey twice, I ran Troy back again, and the results remain the same: This hits, I’m afraid.

The main criticism of Troy is that it’s melodramatic-blockbuster-mid; I’d argue the melodrama is what makes it sing. Brad Pitt and Peter O’Toole have talked down on it since; O’Toole reportedly couldn’t even get through a screening of the finished film. Pitt, reflecting on the experience years later, said “Somewhere in it, Troy became a commercial kind of thing. Every shot was like, ‘Here’s the hero!’ There was no mystery.”

Brad’s right about that: Troy, via a screenplay from future Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff, essentially turns The Iliad into a soap opera, reducing the infamous Trojan War from 10 years to what feels like 10 weeks max, sans gods and heavy on petty mortal narrative devices. But that sounds worse on paper than the film Petersen ultimately delivered, a large-scale tale made in the mold of old Hollywood epics that still manages to make the drama feel accessible.