Release Date: May 14, 2004
Starring: Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Brian Cox, Sean Bean, Diane Kruger, Rose Byrne, Brendan Gleeson, Peter O'Toole
Directed by: Wolfgang Petersen
Written by: David Benioff
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
MPAA Rating: R (graphic violence, some sexuality/nudity)
Of the many themes spelled out by Homer in his epic poem, The Iliad, the one that the filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen and the screenwriter David Benioff have chosen to focus on in their liberal adaptation, Troy, is the legacy of men, the mark for future generations to see, which some will leave and others will not. The legacy of Troy is likely to be that it is an immensely enjoyable popcorn movie but not the literate, well-rounded, well-plotted swords-and-sandals epic that Gladiator was.
True of all popcorn actioners, Troy has an extraordinary budget ($200 million, according to some estimates) that is put to good use in developing a sense of scale for the film that is just as large. The story, which should be familiar (at least in summary) to all, is that the Greeks and Trojans are fighting over the love of a single woman, the Spartan queen Helen (played by the German model Diane Kruger), who is so beautiful that her name inspired the Greeks to launch a thousand ships and 50,000 warriors to reclaim her from Paris (Orlando Bloom), the prince of Troy. Petersen never misses a chance to show the full, extraordinary extent of these armies, which, as one character puts it, have come to fight a war the likes of which the world has never seen. His money shot, of course, is one that was included in the theatrical trailers: a slow zoom out to show one ship, and then a dozen, and then a hundred, and then a thousand, all sailing for Troy and war. Petersen also has several more like it, in which wide-angle shots capture great masses of men swarming over the land like ants from an anthill.
This is Petersen’s specialty, but any viewer who has seen his share of epic actioners will say that it is no great task for a director to put together a “big” movie with thousands of computer-generated extras nowadays. What Troy lacks is a true lead, the charismatic central figure that Gladiator had in Russell Crowe’s Maximus. As the legendary Greek warrior Achilles, Brad Pitt is ostensibly the picture’s hero, but it is clear that Benioff’s screenplay struggles to place him within its altered scope. Achilles feuds with Agamemnon (Brian Cox), the commander of the Greek armies, over the love of a slave girl named Briseis (Rose Byrne), and refuses to join the fighting -- which all but eliminates his character for large parts of the film. Still, Petersen wants Pitt to be the movie’s star, which means that the actor is forced before the camera in several scenes only to butcher lines (it’s hard to take Pitt seriously when he urges his soldiers on, Knute Rockne style, with the line, “Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!”) and look outclassed by the better performers around him (especially in the scene between Achilles and the Trojan king, Priam, who is played by Peter O’Toole). Pitt is seriously miscast as Achilles.
Rather, as in Homer’s Iliad, the more interesting characters are in the wings. On the Greek side, Sean Bean has limited but effective screen time as Odysseus; as a top general and a patient, more thoughtful companion to the rash Achilles, he perfectly fulfills Homer’s famous description of Odysseus as the “great tactician.” But Eric Bana gives the best performance of the film as Hector, a prince of Troy who is charged with defending the city against the Greek armies after his brother Paris stole Helen from her husband, the Greek king Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson). Bana nails Hector’s humility, nobility, and grief, and remarkably, sells us on his love for his brother, too -- despite that, as in the poem, Paris is mostly a simpering pretty-boy (a brave move on the part of the heartthrob Bloom to consistently play him as such). One of Bana’s most dynamic scenes is the one in which he rescues Paris from a duel with Menelaus, staged to settle the war -- one which Paris feels compelled to fight but all know he is destined to lose. That Hector intercedes is a serious breach of honor by the film’s standards, and yet his concern for Paris is the far more palpable emotion in the scene.
It is worth saying that Hector’s part in rescuing Paris from the duel is an interesting requirement of the movie. Benioff has chosen to eliminate the mythological Greek gods from the plot, which changes the story remarkably (among many other things, it was Aphrodite who saved Paris from certain death at Menelaus’s hands). In Homer’s poem, the many gods of Olympus took part in the war, aiding one side of the cause and hindering the other to settle rivalries among themselves, developing an unspoken theme of the tragic futility of human warfare. Without the gods, the action has been reduced to a bland, vain quest for glory and riches, personified mostly by Cox’s power-hungry but forgettable Agamemnon.
Such themes often get trampled underfoot in grand-scale epics like this, movies that essentially aim to please large audiences by impressing with their bigness. Yet some of the movie’s best action scenes are not the Braveheart-esque clashes of thousands of soldiers in messy, hand-to-hand fighting but the more personal duels fought between the story’s star warriors. The famous fight between Hector and Achilles, which comes near the end of the movie, should stand out in the minds of many viewers as the best in the film, as it is so wonderfully captured and choreographed. As the two warriors strike and parry in an intricate, dance-like engagement, Petersen ratchets up the tension by dropping all of the ambient noise except for a steady drumbeat that builds toward the fight’s inevitable climax. The scenes in which the Greeks take the beach at Troy -- the first time that Achilles and Hector meet -- or when the Trojans attack the Greek encampment with flaming arrows at night, or, in the end, when the Greeks gain entry to the walls of Troy through the use of the infamous Trojan horse are also outstanding.
Petersen, a German filmmaker who came to Hollywood after directing the famous submarine thriller Das Boot, shows a European’s sensibility in stringing all of these elements together; he favors pans and zooms and awkward, stilted editing. As a result, and regrettably, Troy lacks a consistent flow, and the contrast between the talk and the action can be jarring, the kind of meat-grinder style that suggests spaghetti Westerns or maybe the cinemascope epics of Hollywood’s golden age. But Homer’s epic poem is difficult material to adapt into a commercially-acceptable running time of two to three hours in the first place. By turning the film into a kind of live-action Cliff’s Notes, in which characterization and more complex thematic elements are sacrificed in service of universally recognizable staples like war for power, money, and love, Petersen and Benioff have probably done the best they can.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)