Movie Reviews

I admit that I don't know very much about Homer or the myth/legend of the Trojans and the Greeks. So I'm not even going to bother trying to describe with much detail the plot of Wolfgang Petersen's new film, Troy. Basically, some pansy Trojan prince named Paris (Orlando Bloom) gets the hots for a Grecian queen named Helen (Diane Kruger), whose husband happens to be the King of Sparta, a kingdom with a long history of hatred towards the Trojans.

So anyway, despite the pleadings of Paris's brother Hector (Eric Bana), Paris and Helen run away together, giving the King of Sparta enough reason to finally decide to lay siege to the city of Troy. To this end, the King employs the aid of Achilles (Brad Pitt), the greatest warrior in Grecian history. Achilles doesn't care much for his king, a point clumsily hammered in early during a big battle, when a messenger is summed to bring Achilles up to the front lines to duel with a hulk of a man, brandishing some evil-looking weaponry. Achilles is discovered in his little hut lying naked next to one of his concubines (or whatever she was), and later makes it clear to the king that he doesn't appreciate being 'disturbed' like that simply to fight his kind's battles. Yeah, Achilles was apparently a real bad-ass Greek.

Anyway, the majority of the film is pretty standard "epic battle" stuff, though I hate to use the word "epic" here because I never got the sense that much was going on outside the trials and tribulations of Paris, Hector, and Achilles. It seemed to me that there was some potentially interesting material in the sense that neither side of the battle (the Trojans and the Greeks) where necessarily "in the right" or "in the wrong" in reasoning their side of the struggle. But such an interesting ambiguity apparently wasn't of interest to the filmmakers, so it wasn't explored. Also, where are the Gods? If there's one thing I know about this era, it's that it's all about the deities -- which are barely even mentioned in passing here.

Essentially, everything about Troy was quite unspectacular. Even the special effects and cinematography, which seemed promising from ads I'd seen, were just too polished and shiny to seem realistic. The casting was the same, too... no matter how much dirt you smear on him, Brad Pitt is just too polished and shiny to play one of the world's greatest warriors. The only thing that was spectacular was the musical score. It was so bloody overly "spectacular" and dramatic that it became very annoying very quickly.

In fact, I kept thinking to myself that the movie seemed like a high-school production in many ways. They had the costumes, they had the sets, and they even had real scripts with words printed on them. But nothing was convincing and none of the actors disappeared into their characters. At best it was mildly entertaining; most of the time it was pretty boring.

It's funny how different people can react so differently to a film, though. At one point, when all I wondered about was "how much longer until the ending?", I noticed two women in front of me were silently weeping tears during an apparently "touching" and sad moment. Whatever.