An acceptable movie with some wasted potential

Rating: 7/10 (31 May 2004)

Troy is extremely loosely based on Homer's writings, so do not expect a movie based on the book. Instead Hollywood have made a screenplay the Hollywood way, and I am so lucky that I have not read the book, so I was not disappointed about the characters.
The movie has a huge budget and I am sure that the producers expected to make an epic movie like Spartacus, Ben-Hur or Patton, but they failed to succeed on this level.
An epic movie needs to be big in every sense, and not all directors have understood what makes a big movie big. Battle scenes with huge armies are often a good way to make the movie big, and Petersen understood this very well. You can enjoy the visual part of the battle scenes, I can only say that the battle scenes are impressive.
An epic movie should also have a good story, and this is one of the weak points in this movie. I am sure the story has a lot of potential, but it does not work that well in the movie. It is maybe because the movie is too short with less than 3 hours. Ben-Hur is almost 4 hours long, and I miss 30 minutes or more of Troy. Some scenes were simply too short, which often is a bad habit for modern cinema.
The casting should also be right in an epic, and I am not sure that the choice of Brad Pitt was right. He would be credible, if Achilles was presented as a god, but he was not. Instead he was presented as a great warrior, and I cannot see Brad Pitt as a legendary warrior. The other actors worked better with Eric Bana as the best. Sometimes I felt that Orlando Bloom was more Legolas than Paris, when he was using his bow. I think it was a bit dangerous to choose an actor who just has been a main character in a recently released trilogy, but this will maybe change over the years. You do not think that Indiana Jones is Han Solo today.
Still I feel that the movie was not that good. As a part of the audience I felt that some parts of the story were not really explained, instead the movie continued to the next phase, where I was sitting back disappointed that some part of the plot was not explained more in details. This is not the feeling I want to have, when I watch a potential epic movie.
The movie had the potential to be legendary, but something went wrong during the production. I do not think it is Petersen's fault, it is more likely that it was the script. I think the movie was acceptable and maybe a bit more than that, but it will possibly be forgotten in 10 years.
7/10