For those of you out there who are Dwayne Johnson fans, or fans of his wrestling days in particular, you'll know full well that back in January The Rock finally became WWE Champion again as part of the company's huge PR stunt of generating more publicity for their part-time superstar's movies (were it needed) and guaranteeing itself higher TV ratings and increased pay-per-view buys. Looking ahead, wrestling purists will sniff that, staged as the matches already are, there's no chance in hell that Rocky will be walking out of next month's Wrestlemania still holding the title as schedule dictates he must take a leave of absence to film his next round of movies. Amongst these projects lies an adaptation of the comic-book series Hercules: The Thracian Wars, in which he's set to play the titular character, naturally. Brett Ratner as director aside, I'm reasonably excited about this film, if for nothing else because it's been far too long since we've had a Hercules film on the big screen. We've seen plenty of pretenders in recent years; ever since the success of Gladiator back in 2000 which provoked renewed interest in the long-defunct Sword and Sandal genre, in what came to be known as the Gladiator effect, we've seen films about Achilles, Alexander the Great, Perseus, Theseus, and, of course, those 300 Spartans in their rubber pants at Thermopylae. Johnson himself also played a Hercules-like character in 2002's The Scorpion King. But none of these characters can match the legacy of Greek mythology's original and most famous musclebound hero, yet you have to go back 16 years to find a film that featured him as the protagonist: the well-meaning, kid-friendly, and highly Disney-fied treatment that was 1997's Hercules, which endowed him with the inspirational yet somewhat trite adolescent rags-to-riches story arc that Disney had already perfected with Aladdin. So it's clear that a more mature cinematic treatment of the hero is long overdue, and we've still got until summer 2014 to wait for it. In that time, assuming you are excited about Ratner and Johnson's project of course, why not go back and re-visit some of the previous Classically-themed movies that have taken to occupying our cinemas? One of these would be Wolfgang Petersen and Brad Pitt's Troy from 2004, an epic that was one of the first signs of the Gladiator effect. Though it represented a solid box-office success, grossing almost $500 million worldwide, it proved far less of a hit with critics and Classicists, or those who at least who claimed to have a knowledge of the source material. What follows then are five reasons why this film in particular is worth a re-visit and should not be so unfairly maligned.