Troy

Rating: 3/10 (11 August 2008)

Troy is essentially two and a half hours of burly men harping on about how their actions will ensure that their names are remembered for millennia. Which is ironic, because for all the characters' talk about the immortality of fame, the film's sheer mediocrity ensures that it will be remembered little beyond the end credits.
The plot is common knowledge, so I'll be brief. Paris (Orlando Bloom), son of Priam, king of Troy (Peter O'Toole), kidnaps Helen (Diane Kruger), wife of Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), king of Sparta. So Menelaus' brother, Agamemnon (Brian Cox) unites all of Greece and lays siege to Troy. During the siege, a rivalry develops between Hector (Eric Bana), Troy's best warrior, and Achilles (Brad Pitt), the greatest warrior in the world. Ever.
The primary source for all of this is, of course, the Iliad, Homer's ancient epic poem that uses the Trojan war as a vehicle for the exploration of honour, camaraderie, grief, and compassion. All of which director Wolfgang Petersen and writer David Benioff decided they could ignore, in favour of the aforementioned drivel about immortality.
The best example of this complete misinterpretation of the Iliad is Troy's seeming inability to decide which side, the Greeks or the Trojans, is most deserving of our sympathy. While Homer's poem shows great compassion for both armies, Petersen's film abandons this idea, instead making the Greeks war-hungry oafs, the Trojans cowardly layabouts erroneously defending Orlando Bloom, and both sides utterly unworthy of our support.
This isn't helped by the level of acting present. None of the performances are bad, per se; but none of the actors manage to infuse their characters with the kind of humanity needed to engage the audience. The only actor who come close is Peter O'Toole as King Priam, but he is so underused he never gets a chance to develop the character.
Also missing are the Greek gods, whose intervention was the driving force behind the events of the Iliad. Leaving them out probably made sense in the script meetings; the days when Lawrence Olivier could put on a bed sheet and declare himself Zeus are gone. But in the Iliad, the gods weren't just childish super beings. They were symbols, metaphors for different aspects of human nature. When Ares, the god of bloody slaughter, would join the Trojans in battle, it signified that they were overcome by an insatiable blood lust. When Athena, goddess of heroic valour, descended into the Greek ranks, we know they are fighting with honour. Without these symbols, the battles of Troy are empty and meaningless.
They don't even look that good. Sure, the CGI is impressive, but what CGI isn't these days? Cinema has become so saturated with hordes of computer generated warriors hacking each other to pieces that not even "the largest army the world has ever seen", as one character probably boasts, can truly excite audiences any more.
Troy is the epitome of Hollywood's recent spate of blockbuster epics; it is bland, empty, meaningless, and any other word you might find in a thesaurus under "dull". We can't even enjoy the end credits, that final release from a bad film, because there's an awful, awful song.