By David Larsen

THE "sword-and-sandals" film comes in three generic flavors: barbarian, biblical, and Greco-Roman, each envisioning the martial values of a bygone "time before gunpowder" in its own fashion.

While the first category may be counted on to support a heavy admixture of sorcery and fabulous monsters, the prevailing conceit in the biblical and Greco-Roman epics is one of historical realism. Costumes and manners are based on the soundest classical scholarship Hollywood can buy, and intelligible modern motives are supplied for the most outlandish deeds of history and legend.

But the greatest care is routinely expended on the depiction of military techniques and implements, which strive to convince down to the last brazen detail. While nothing enhances the spell of the sword-and-sandals picture like the competing spectacle of a real war, it seems that nothing is held to be more fatal to the spell than a filmgoer's companion leaning over to whisper, "The chin-strap on the Mycenaean helmet was in reality much wider."

Of the year's three contributions to the genre, the demand for verisimilitude sat lightest on Troy. Homer's own descriptions of Bronze Age warfare have long been a disappointment to historians: "No one commands or gives orders," Moses Finley scoffs in The World of Odysseus. "Men enter the battle and leave at their own pleasure; they select their individual opponents; they group and regroup for purely personal reasons." In other words, it's the antithesis of modern mechanized warfare and (one would think) tailor-made for the personalized conventions of the big screen. And yet audiences seemed less than rapt.

Was it the filmmakers' failure to exploit the East-versus-West master narrative underlying the entire conflict, as the Lord of the Rings trilogy did so winningly? Wolfgang Petersen's Trojans, led by Peter O'Toole, are imagined as a sensual, superstitious, and regionally unidentifiable folk who prance about in robes of indigo (an intriguing choice, as they're often depicted wearing Tyrian purple). The fighting is delightful, with Brad Pitt's Myrmidon warriors performing an acrobatic version of the phalanx maneuvers developed in the much, much later seventh century BCE. The armor gleams and shines in the Maltese sun. And best of all, the script's many narrative liberties lend the old Homeric story an element of surprise that's long been missing.

There's no such play in The Passion of the Christ, in which, it hardly needs pointing out, soldiers and Easterners alike come off much less sympathetically. Partly this is dictated by its genre: unlike the other varieties of sword-and-sandals film, Bible pictures are generally barred from celebrating ancient military might. In the unsubtle hands of Mel Gibson, though, the anti-imperialist bent is anything but gratuitous.

The usual meticulous care with Roman helmetry is taken, as well as a creative Persian approach to the armor worn by the Hebrew temple guards. The script's rendering into Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic is of a heroic painstakingness not seen since the mid-'60s heyday of Esperanto cinema. To the Arabophone viewer, or anyone with a year or two of Hebrew school, it presents an affrontingly intimate blend of phonemes and racial stereotypes: as always, Levantine village manners are aped as a substitute for biblical ones, and in the film's casting, physiognomy appears to have been the paramount concern. When the temple elders connive and mock in all their glinting finery, the caricature is too familiar to be transporting. If nothing else, all viewers can agree The Passion is of no escapist value whatsoever.

Alexander is at once the most sophisticated and least memorable of the year's sword-and-sandal offerings. Oliver Stone, known because of his Conan the Barbarian script as a past master of sword and sandals, far outdoes the praises of Plutarch in giving us Alexander the selfless liberator of Eastern masses from their hazily envisioned oppressors, but cannot save his film from the fatally episodic and repetitive life of its subject. Although Alexander's exploits will bring our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the mind of even the most unreflective audience member, the film's polemical thrust is as oddly inconclusive as its elephant warfare. The film's only clear victor is Alexander's mother, played by Angelina Jolie, who, out of all three films, turns in the only "bewitching temptress" performance worth mentioning. Maybe her role will lead some more daring filmmaker to a revival of the Salome story, or perhaps the tale of Yemen's queen of Sheba. But it's sadly doubtful that the box office fortunes of Troy and Alexander will be inspiring a new Greco-Roman extravaganza anytime soon.

David Larsen is a lecturer in classics at UC Extension.