I want to start this off by saying that I absolutely love Steve Reeves. I think he's got a lot of raw talent and I really loved his Hercules movies. Unfortunately, the fact that I saw his Hercules movies before this one created a bit of a problem for me, because every time I see him in a role like this now, all I can see him as is Hercules. This movie was no exception, and in fact, I found myself actually typing the name Hercules rather than Phillipides more than once. A lot of that has to do with the fact that he plays the roles in a very similar way, the only difference being that the Phillipides character doesn't possess supernatural strength. I guess when you're playing Greek heroes, there's not much of a range of character you can bring to the part, so it's not really his fault at all. I've seen him in Ed Wood's movie Jail Bait and he was totally different. So apparently, unlike Christopher Walken, Steve Reeves does actually have an acting range.

The story is pretty simple. It's a tale of treason in which Theocrates has conspired with one of the city's exiled leaders and the Persian king Darius to convince the Athenian council that they should surrender to the invading Persian forces without a fight. Naturally this doesn't happen, and through a lot of intrigue, murder, and broken hearts, Phillipides manages to secure the support of Athens' long time enemies, the Spartans in the final battle against the Persian army.

That simplifies it quite a bit but I'm sure you get the idea. Where the "giant" part comes in, and for that matter where the "Marathon" part comes in, I have no idea. Nor do I understand why there were character names in the movie that seemed to change depending on who was pronouncing it at the time. Actually, to point out how bad this was, let me give you a little insight into how I do the character section. I get the character names from IMDB and then fill them in when I'm setting up the review. In the case of this film, I filled in the character names and then ended up changing about half of them and getting rid of a few that I never even saw in the movie. It's not that big of a deal really, because when you have a visual medium like film, you can see the characters, so even if they're called by a different name in every scene, you still know who's who. Unfortunately, from the reviewer's point of view it was kind of a pain since I had to keep changing things. I just kinda took the version of the names that I heard the most and used those.

The acting in this movie was pretty typical of the Italian sword and sandal genre, although some of the performances were actually somewhat "above the bar" so to speak. They weren't way better than you'd expect, but they were quite good for the genre. Steve Reeves always seems to be put in the same romantic situations in these sword and sandal films, where he's in love with one girl while there's another girl on the side that wants him for herself and uses various little machinations and schemes to get him. They never work, but they always serve to complicate his life and make the story a little more interesting.

The battle scenes were all quite well done and choreographed in this film, but there was one thing that bothered me a little. They beat the ever living hell out of their horses. There were a lot of horses tripped up and rolled in this film, and I know that the way it was done, they couldn't possibly have done it without injuring not only some of the horses, but some of the riders as well. The first scene that really got my attention was a scene where Phillipides was riding to the Sacred Guard to tell them of the impending attack by sea, when he was attacked and his horse took a front end dump. Whoever was on the horse, whether it be Steve Reeves or a stunt double, ended up under the horse and under the horses hooves when the horse got up and ran off. That looked exceedingly painful, and I felt sorry for not only the horse, but whoever was riding it. The other scenes that made me cringe were the ones where the Persians launched their main assault. The Athenians had dug trenches, and when the horses hit them, they piled up big time. The horses and the riders were all just rolled into one big jumble. It's another time where I know both horses and riders had to have been injured.

The DVD I used for this review came from Alpha. Alpha generally puts out a decent product when you consider that their releases can be purchased for $5.99 each from their site, and if you buy five at a time you can even get them for $5 each. Now you can't be overly picky when you're getting cool movies like this for so little money, but this particular DVD looks like it was mastered from a VHS tape and the image quality is downright horrible in some scenes. It's not unwatchable, but there's scenes where there's a lot of people shot from a distance where you can't make out a lot of individual detail. If you look at the screenshots and character shots I use in this review, you can see what the quality is like in those. Now here's the bad news. I cleaned those images quite a bit. The original quality was worse. As I said though, the DVD isn't unwatchable by any means, it's just not a high quality master done from original source material. So don't go into it expecting to see that kind of quality. I doubt very much that Steve Reeves fans will even really care about the quality as long as they can get the movie in a digital format.

Overall, this was a good film, but it was lacking in certain aspects that forced me to knock a little off the final rating. Generally, as far as sword and sandal flicks go, this was a good one. If you're a fan of Steve Reeves, you'll definitely like it, but just be aware going in that he doesn't have the trademark Hercules beard in this one, so it'll probably take you a while to adjust to that if you're used to seeing him that way. Until a better release of this movie comes along that was mastered from good source materials, this one will do. Just know what to expect going in, and you'll be ok.