East meets West in Sinbad. The movie took great artistic license with the Nights story of Sinbad and added Greek elements in terms of locations, names, and a goddess, as also added Western morals. The movie starts is Syracuse, a Greek city in southern Italy. The Greek goddess Eres is the villain of the story and the sailors encounter Sirens, also of Greek mythology. Perhaps Dreamworks decided to play it safe with this version of Sinbad by completely avoiding the Orient and therefore avoiding any mention of the Middle East. When the movie was released in 2003, tensions were great regarding anything related to the Middle East.