Would Make a Great Silent Film

Rating: 6/10 (16 May 2004)

Cheesy dialogue and horrible music score aside, Wolfgang Peterson's grand adaptation of the age-old Greek legend is a very entertaining spectacle in that old-fashioned sword and sandals Hollywood epic kind of way. As with all good big-budget, star-studded, action-packed overwrought quasi-historical epics, "Troy" is as memorable for its follies (the horribly miscast Pitt as Achilles, the uninspiring Diana Kruger as Helen, the annoying as hell Orlando Bloom as Paris, the pretty-boy homo-erotic nature of it all) as it is for its triumphs (the massive sets and fantastically choreographed battle scenes, the scene-stealing performance from Peter O'toole as King Priam, the deliciously vile Brian Cox as the ruthless Agamemnon, and the star-making turn from Eric Bana as Hector).
Thankfully Peterson is an old-school director, so despite Pitt's posturing and male model stares that reminded me of Ben Stiller's hilarious "blue steel" look from "Zoolander" and a painfully stale script that doesn't allow the viewer to root for anyone, he avoids all flash and music-video style editing to give the film its refreshingly old-fashioned look and its "this is an epic from another era" pace. Both of these welcome throwbacks to the heyday of Cecil B. DeMille make the film itself more endearing (albeit in a very dull way) than any of the wishy-washy characters parading in togas across the movie screen. In the end, with nary an authentic Greek to be seen in the cast of thousands, varying degrees of wavering British accents and the reduction of a richly layered and complex centuries old legend into a single two and half hour Hollywood movie, Homer is probably rolling over in his ferry on the river Styx, but I still enjoyed my popcorn and passed a few hours of my time.