Good film for war/history fans, flawed, but worth every penny

Rating: 10/10 (19 May 2004)

Troy is an excellent movie. For any war/history buff there is enough here to feed upon to overlook any flaws.
First, in response to all the Gladiator lovers who said on the boards that there is no one to cheer for in Troy, I say they are idiots. Gladiator was about a single protagonist. Homer's Iliad was always a complicated, ensemble story. The audience has to deal with a lot of main characters and THIS IS A GOOD THING. Its the Iliad, not Batman.
There was a complaint about the film not having a good side to relate to. This one irritates me. Real life seldom has the simplistic good guy vs. bad guy dichotomy. This in my mind makes Troy that much more believable. When events unfold I actually believed they could happen. Japanese cinema is so good at times precisely because we don't know who the good guy is. The question is simply irrelevant.
The script was written with a mind to keep the important details of the original story intact but to make it as realistic as possible. The gods are there but only in spirit. They don't get directly involved in the action like the original. I think this is a good thing as well. Troy looks like historical recreation rather than a literal translation of the poem. In one scene I thought there was an unlikely event and researched only to find it actually is in the Iliad. When the writer was asking for too much, he was in fact being true to the text. My bad.
OK, visually this film is amazing. Not just the army special effects but the sets and scenery are all beautiful. The costuming is first rate and feels very authentic. Remember, we are going back 3200 years. Quite an accomplishment.
The violence is likewise beautiful. Blood and guts galore, but interestingly it is both on the battlefield AND in single combat. A fight fan will appreciate the attention to detail in the combatants' moves. I had never seen a shield wielded so realistically on film. Spear and sword are given very realistic treatments as well.
Brad Pitt is a good actor. No question about that. Here he has a few moments where he seems out of place, a pretty boy in a soldier's world. But the combat scenes with him are more than enough to make up for that. It has already been discussed how much bigger he is than in Fight Club. The womens will have plenty to look at. His character is complicated and this is also true to the Iliad. Brad Pitt does this internal conflict lots of justice. His actions in the film really seem appropriate. I never asked, like I do in other films, "Why did he do that?" But this is not Brad Pitt's film. It's Eric Bana's.
Eric Bana was amazing. If Achilles was complex, then Bana's Hector is even more so. I had only seen Bana in Black Hawk Down and The Hulk and while BHD was good, there wasn't much for his character to do but be a soldier. The Hulk was so bad I wrote him off completely, blaming his acting for not saving a horrible script. But here in Troy I have new-found respect. He is the main character in the film if you judge by acting power. Lots of emotional struggling going on here that Bana takes on like a pro. He will join this generation's acting elite if he finds more roles like this.
The rest of the cast is good enough with a special note for Peter O'Toole and Brian Cox. Their lines are well delivered and their characters are believable.
The writing is good as far as plot development goes but I would take a few points away for some of the modern vocabulary. "Stop playing with me," the pretty Helen tells Paris. "Playing" should have been "joking" in that scene since I associate playing with modern English and even worse, with modern hip hop English. I shouldn't be getting that feeling in an ancient epic.

A+