It started as an attempt to film Homer. The hero is named Achilles. The woman he loves is Athena. Stuart Gordon, who had just made Re-Animator, wanted to do the Iliad as science fiction.

He hired Joe Haldeman to script it. Haldeman had won the Hugo and the Nebula for The Forever War, a book he wrote after being wounded as a combat engineer in Vietnam.

The two men could not agree on what they were making. Haldeman wanted serious science fiction. Gordon wanted, in Haldeman's words, Saturday-morning cartoon stuff. Years later Haldeman said the finished film was like a child who started out fine and then took brain damage.

In ROBOT JOX (1990), two nations settle their wars by having chosen champions fight to the death, one on one, while the world watches. Celebrity pilots control fifty-foot machines and punch each other to pieces.

It cost a fortune by the standards of Charles Band's Empire Pictures. The movie bankrupted the company mid-production, and crept into theaters three years late, almost unnoticed.

Twenty-three years later, Pacific Rim tried something similar and made over half a billion dollars.