Every cliché in the book, but i liked it

Rating: 8/10 (16 November 2008)

Troy opened up with some music, a little too heavily synthesized, building up tension between two humongous armies approaching each other. The suspense comes to a halt in an anticlimactic moment, as the all-powerful king cracks a joke. He then persuades his opponent to have their respective armies' best soldier fight each other rather than a more traditional all-out battle to spare bloodshed and gore. This is another anticlimax of sorts, we expected a big all-out fight and now we're not getting one, and now the squeamish people in the audience who don't like to see a bloody battle can feel relief. Within seconds, the next clever plot twist arrives, as we find our hero, Achilles, who we're looking forward to seeing because he's played by A-lister Brad Pitt, is actually missing from the battlefield because he had a wild night of passion and overslept, but he wakes up and goes out to the battlefield, where awaiting us are plot twists #4, that Brad Pitt is not as friendly as we thought he'd be, and #5, that the cocky guy twice his size is really no match for him.
Within five minutes, every trick in the book has been used and while it's unoriginal, those gimmicks might have worked in other circumstances, but here, they felt like a half-desperate attempt to make sure that any and every mainstream viewer would be hooked onto this film. The original story of Troy, just wasn't gonna cut it, the producers probably thought. It's too long-winded, too complicated, these people regularly talk and interact with Gods, who would go for that? So the producers gave us a more Americanized version.
When rallying his troops to war, Prince Hector cries, "no men, we all love our families, we all love our country, and we all love our Gods", which sounds just like how the president would address soldiers today, making the audience think, "oh, I was originally not sure if I'd like this boring Greek story, but these characters are so universal and I can relate to them," but the truth is that those characters weren't relatable, because, yes they might have had some love for family or for country, but they're love for their Gods was much stronger and incredibly different than our love of Gods today. Not only did they believe in more than one God, but they weren't abstract beings from an unknown place in the sky, they regularly came down and interacted with the humans, they were recognizable detailed beings with different attributes and they didn't all like each other, not did they like all of the humans equally. In the Illiad, the gods Apollo and Athena are even rooting for the Trojans to win the war and actively help control the turn of events. In fact, Achilles is half-God himself, that's why he can run so fast. These parts of the story were vaguely referenced but ultimately left out to spare confusion.
I really didn't get what the point was of digging up and adapting a Great work of Greek literature of they were going to strip it of it's Greekness. If I wanted to see great special effects, I could have gone to The Day After Tomorrow, but I chose to see this because of the cultural context of this story, where Gods were more numerous and warriors had a different place in society. This is definitely part of a trend that echoes our new global era in politics, where barriers between countries are being lowered and people around the world are discovering they have a lot in common. At the same time, though, our differences in cultures over history should be celebrated too, and it's a more worthless experience when the makers of this film chose to leave out those cultural quirks.
I also think another force in play, which isn't the film's fault, necessarily, is how tightly all the big-budget films are released within one summer. Ten years ago, Forrest Gump opened in the summer of '94 and made 24,000 in its opening weekend, taking the #1 spot, dropped only 1.3% percent the next weekend, and was the #1 movie 6 weekends of that year. Troy, opened only 5 days before a highly anticipated Shrek, which made an eye-popping $125 million by weekend's end. Troy cost 175 million to make, so in order to make its money back it had to attract audiences attentions, and I think the filmmakers were under so much pressure to make that return that they made a safer picture with surefire widespread appeal, which deprived of us of what could have been a great movie.
I don't know how this could be fixed, but it's a clear sign that the onslaught of new summer blockbuster after blockbuster, each one displacing the one before it as #1, is taking its toll on the quality of films.
Sorry to drift into a tangent there, so back to the film. I still gave it 3 and a ½ stars, because once I accepted the Americanized road I was traveling on, I could enjoy the film's dramatic moments, the cinematography and, with the exception of Orlando Bloom, a first-rate ensemble. Homer wrote an incredible story, so it was hard not to be moved, and I have heard an argument that this Americanized version has encouraged viewers to read the book and culturally enhance themselves. I just think that the film, if it stuck to its roots, could have been better.