Will Be One of the ten best movies of 2004

Rating: Null/10 (17 May 2004)

Troy, the movie, has flaws, but it also many strengths. It is a much better than many of the critics give it credit for.
Yes, Brad Pitt's Achilles is not perfect, but I can not think of any major actor who could do a better job portraying a man who thinks, moves, fights, and looks like he is an equal to the gods. Eric Bana's Hector was fantastic. Contrary to many of the reviews I did not find there were too many characters to allow any to be well developed. Yes, there were many characters, as the Iliad requires, but Achilles, Hector, and Paris were well developed and the story largely revolved around them.
Among the minor characters, Sean Bean's Odysseus shined, as did Saffron Burrows' portrayal of Hector's wife. The costumes and sets did a wonderful job of bringing to life the late Bronze Age, a time more primitive and further removed from our collective consciousness than that of ancient Rome.
The battle scenes were less gratuitous and were easier to follow than in many movies. Several of the one-on-one fight scenes, particularly that between Achilles and Hector, were exceptional.
For me the movie's 2 hour and 40 minutes sped by. The script did have a few dumb lines, but also some good one. It is foolish to criticize the movie for taking substantial liberties with Homer's book. Any high budget movie of the Iliad that was faithful to Homer would have been financial suicide for its investors and much less satisfying to most viewers.
My major complaints were that Diane Kruger, although clearly attractive, was not the rare one-in-a-hundred-thousand beauty (like the young Candice Bergen) that Helen should have been. I personally found Saffron Burrows much more attractive. I also thought that Brain Cox's Agamemnon was a little too much of a cartoon villain. But then many have complained the plot was too full of moral equivalence, so perhaps painting someone as a black hat was needed to make the story more emotionally accessible to the masses.
In summary, I think it is likely that when 2004 ends, Troy will be at least one of my 10 favorite films of the years.