If all you want is spectacle then this will just about do you  but it is dull, emotionless spectacle

Rating: Null/10 (28 May 2004)

King Agamemnon sweeps across the land with his mighty army and his supposedly invincible warrior Achilles at the front. Meanwhile one his subject is brokering peace with the princes of Troy  Hector and Paris. When Paris steals the beautiful Helen from Menelas and takes her to Troy it sparks a battle and gives Agamemnon the chance to seize Troy. Inside the city walls of Troy the defences are build and the walls relied on to withstand the attack as they have so often, while on the beaches the mighty army of Agamemnon land and prepare for a long and bloody battle.
Let us not forget that this film is a summer blockbuster and, as such, the important thing is spectacle and noisy effects rather than anything else  it's a sad fact but it is a fact. If this is what you want from the film then it has plenty of action, plenty of big bronzed men with swords, heroic deaths and big set pieces. If this is all you want then you are very easy to please and I salute you for that  I wanted more than just action and unfortunately I found Troy to be devoid of anything else of value. In terms of action and effects it all looks good and is technically impressive but the problem with the action, nay the whole film, is that it has zero emotional involvement to draw you in. I could barely care less who lives or dies, who wins or loses because these were not people  they were just big, larger than life blocks  the gods may have been removed from the story but they have been replaced by Petersen who views these characters as his playthings instead!
I won't get into petty squabbles over the changes to the source material (I'm reviewing the film in itself) but it did seem to me that the loss of the gods is part of the problem. With the gods' meddling, all the fighting is their fault and we would have felt for the characters  they had no choice. Without the gods the whole war is silly and pointless, based on the silly crush of a boy on a woman who is known for her beauty more than her character (a beauty that will fade). For this reason I never felt for any of them because I wasn't sure who I was rooting for  I was against them all and only wanted it all to be over. But hang on Bob  aren't you missing the point? Well, maybe. I thought that myself  this is a sort of anti-war film after all so maybe the pointlessness of the whole affair is the message the film is delivering? Maybe, but I doubt it. The film tries to be anti-war by having several speeches about the futility of it all and how it never ends but then at the same time it revels in the battle scenes, the heroic deaths, the honour of the men and the roar of battle. It wants to have it's cake and eat it too but in the end all it does is undermine itself in both regards. The situation is silly and pointless and the film knows it  indeed it tries to move way from the battle for Helen as quickly as it can and make it a bigger thing  but it fails, the foundation is weak and never engaged me and attempts to draw me in later were poor. All the story manages to do is to slow the film way down between the battles  it gets the point where I found the film painfully dull and it all was full of it's own self-importance without having anything to actually back up this claim.
The cast is deep in names and faces but very few actually have anything to do  like I said, these are not characters; just blocks to be moved like toy soldiers. Pitt is, well, Brad Pitt. He is very sexy, he looks pretty, he moves well and his body is well sculpted: if that is all you want then that is what he delivers. What he doesn't do is deliver a character or a performance. He plays his hero like an arrogant, petulant child and his woeful attempts to give him a personality or emotion in the final stages of the film are just that  woeful. As a blockbuster star he is OK and does what he normally does, but let us never think for a minute that he is an actor. Bloom shows the same acting ability that he did in LOTR, ie none. He is weedy and needy as a character and it needed a talented actor to deliver this, Bloom can't do it. Bana is a good actor (see Chopper) and he has a good presence here even if his material is weak  for my money he was the star of the film and he outshone Pitt. Kruger is beautiful no doubt but she brings nothing else to the table. Cox is good because he not only seems to be enjoying himself but also is sending the whole film up! He is not a kingly king, he is a modern one and his performance comes close to taking the p*ss. The rest of the cast features a large number of faces that add class even if they have no material to really do anything with  Gleeson, Bean, O'Toole and the ever-reliable James Cosmo.
Overall this film looks great and will provide spectacle if that's all you want  but be warned that it cannot sustain it's running time and it gets very dull between all the noisy effect shots. The story is dull and lacking in any sort of emotional involvement  a fact that makes it duller and takes away from the impact of the action scenes. This is expensive and a big noisy film but it is so deeply flawed and pointless that I found it hard to get through. I'll leave others to debate the issues over the source material, all I cared about was if it was an enjoyable summer film or not  it isn't.