Sadly Over-hyped

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Absolutely Fantastic

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

This is easily the worst adaptation of Greek mythology I've ever seen. It utterly fails as an adaptation of the original myth, inventing silly plot twists and reducing the 12 labours to... 3 or 4, I think. It makes up utterly needless things to try to integrate other myths in clumsy ways which bring into question the writers' having ever read the myths, like changing birds to harpies, lions to sphinxes, the Oracle of Delphi to Tiresias, and bulls to a pedantic version of Proteus, even integrating aspects, never seen outside of Sam Raimi's entertaining series, concerning his first marriage, to a woman with the co-opted name of one of the Furies so it sounds appropriate to the period.I could accept much of that, but it also fails completely in pure film standards; most painful is the dialogue, leaden, portentous pseudo-Shakespearean tripe. It is a poor re-interpretation of the myths, making a sad attempt at the kind of post-modern revisionism that Crichton's "The 13th Warrior" attempted in regards to the Beowulf legend, while still including the strictly mythological elements such as clear interference from the gods and magical super-strength. A sad, sad failure of an entertainment experience, who I'm sure many of the quality actors involved regret deeply.

I saw this advertised as "featuring Sean Astin", and I watched it *for* Sean Astin. I was quite disappointed, and in fact, felt rather embarrassed on his behalf, that he took this role at all, because compared to the character of Sam Gamgee, Linus as faithful servant to Hercules is pitiful. Surely Astin didn't do it for the money? Maybe he did it to work in New Zealand again, who knows.The second-saddest thing, I felt, was the CGI. I was mostly impressed by the rendering of the centaur, but where young Hercules lifts the white colt... urrrgh. And the deer looked like claymation. Horrendous.Most of the characters, though, were interesting to look at. Megara was gorgeous and I found no fault with her (other than being a scheming bitch, of course). But as to why she seduces Hercules then runs off afterwards remains a mystery to me.I consider this, the 3-hour version, a useful diversion from a lackluster Friday night, but I wouldn't bother to see it again.

The mini series Hercules on the SciFi channel was O.K. . The actors and actresses were fabulous; but the one thing I was was hoping for when I read the tittle was that they where finally going to show a movie with all twelve of the labors being done and completed but it wasn't. I wish some day they would create a movie that would have the person portraying the legendary hero Hercules to perform all 12 labors, that would be great; especially with today's computer graphics they could make it a really great movie. The one thing I also didn't not like is how they portrayed Herculess' power they mad him seem like a regular guy but truly he was suppose to much more when it came to his strength. For example when it came to when he was a teenager and tried to lift his mentor he couldn't.

My guess would be this was originally going to be at least two parts, and thus at least a quarter longer, because otherwise how can one explain its confused, abbreviated storyline. I was never completely lost, but I was often partially lost and usually unclear on character motivation. The movie feels as though joining plot points were dropped to squeeze it into its time slot.If it were longer, it might make more sense, but it still wouldn't be much good. The movie's most interesting idea is of the war between Zeus and Hera as being a war between the male and female, but the movie drops the ball on this, making Hera's followers fairly horrible while not being clear on what Zeus' followers do or believe. The movie is also interesting because you don't see the gods and there's no real certainty that they exist. So it's got a couple of intriguing ideas, but it doesn't do anything useful with them.Bad dialog, cardboard characters, and one interesting scene involving Hercules and his three antagonistic sons. Not unwatchable but also not worth watching.