My short opinion

Rating: 6/10 (13 May 2004)

I went to the cinema's with the expectation Troy would at least as good as Gladiator, as some Dutch newspapers said. On the outside this film looks better, but when you pierce through the looks, you have to recognize that the film fails dramaticly to compete with an instant classic like Gladiator.
Let me start with the positive things. Troy is truly a cinema-movie: the battles (there are lots of them, since this movie is only about the war @ Troy), 1on1 fights and actions sequences are great. The settings are marvelous too. The costumes, locations and effects really let you be a part of the action. The actors are really fighting themselves and some scenes really take your breath away. Extra thumbs for the message of the film: there are no winners in war and some things are inevitable (excuse me for my bad English; had some drinks :P).
Now the points where the director fails: no really interesting dialogue, absence of emotion, and a missed change to intwine a romantic love story with old school epic action.
Even the top-actors in the film couldn't prevent the emotional scenes from being dull. The director showed us he can film great action sequences (Das Boot, Perfect Storm), but he doesn't know what to do with the dialogues at all. The romantic scenes between Achilles and his Troyan girlfriend could have formed a nice second storyline, but instead they look roughly cut in the rest of the film. The lines said between the action scenes make you scratch your head and awake deja-vu feelings from The Matrix Revolutions: great action interrupted by inapprehensible philosophical sentences. But where you can unravel some deeper meenings out of the lines of that film, Troy only cites them superficially. Another thing: Orlando Bloom again proves he has no acting talent at all. In fact, the whole audience laughed at him when he was making his 'I'm so sad and lonely and I'm so surprised cuz a monkey jumped into my boot' face. FOR THE TENTH TIME. The model who plays Helena doesn't seem to have any emotion at all. I've seen Brad Pitt play much more exciting roles, but maybe he's trying to show the desperate proudness of Achilles. Then again, the real GOOD actors like Bean, Bana and Brian Cox do a fine job bringing to live Odysseus the Robert the Bruce of Troy, Hector the hero and Agamemnon the bad guy.
So the movie lacks emotional weight and certainly DOESN'T allow you to feel banded with a character (like we sympathized with Maximus' fight against the cruel emperor). It isn't as bad as the instant action carnival of Van Helsing. Instead, it brings decent entertainment to the big screen, and it is a nice beginning of a night out. That probably will be the future for other legends and myths (Hannibal, Alexander, King Arthur)...