Brendan Agnew

Review disc provided by Warner Bros. Home Video, images captured by reviewer and subject to copyright. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman have never exactly stopped being stars, but it’s hard to overstate just how much of a supernova they could each be in their white-hot run during the ’90s. However, the prospect of their uniting to play sisters in a sumptuous adaptation of Alice Hoffman’s 1995 novel Practical Magic couldn’t turn the fantastical melodrama into a hit when it reached theaters.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey may have already become a definitive cinematic epic, but it wasn’t the first stab at putting Homer on the big screen with the full 21st century blockbuster treatment. In 2004, Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, The Neverending Story, Air Force One) released a take on The Iliad that set out to retell the story of the Trojan War for the Gladiator crowd with a production as massive in scope as its story.

Hollywood has been tilting at the windmill of capturing the magic of the King Arthur legend for decades, from the mid-1950s until as recently as 2021’s The Green Knight, but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting closer to bottling the visual and emotional scope of the sweeping epic in a single motion picture than 1981’s Excalibur.