Trojan Bore

Rating: 4/10 (8 June 2005)

Long ago, Euripides wrote a magnificent play called "The Trojan Women." In it, he reveals what happened after the Greeks snuck into Troy via that wooden horse and sacked the city--the women who mourned the dead even as they were taken as slaves, the children murdered for no crime other than being born to the wrong parents, the cruelty of war and man, and the enduring power of the human spirit. Though thousands of years have passed, it remains a drama every bit as powerful and relevant as it was when it was first performed.
I was thinking about "Trojan Women" a lot while watching "Troy"--not because Wolfgang Petersen's movie evoked the same emotions as Euripides' classic drama, but because I couldn't help but think of how much the movie failed to accomplish or even reach for. This is epic-lite, a bunch of decent battle sequences interspersed with soap-opera dialogue which tries in vain to convince us that some of these characters are worth rooting for or against.
"Troy" is a de-mystified, toned-down version of Homer's classic epic "The Illiad," which in and of itself isn't entirely a bad thing. You want to do the Trojan War without all that intervening by the gods, fine. You want to change it so at least some of the characters don't meet with a fantastically tragic death, I can play along. But for mercy's sake, let me at least care what happens one way or the other to the characters, okay? As everyone who's sat through their high school lit class knows, the Trojan War gets sparked off when Paris (Orlando Bloom) decides to make off with the Spartan queen Helen (Diane Kruger, pretty but lacking the je-nes-sais-quois that would help us believe she's capable of inspiring this sort of passion). Not surprisingly, this annoys her husband Menelaus, who immediately applies to his brother Agamemmnon (Brian Cox) for help. The war-mongering Agamemmnon has wanted to get his hands on Troy for a long time, so he takes up Menelaus' cause, rounding up the usual gang of mythological heroes, including Ajax, Odysseus (Sean Bean), and Achilles (Brad Pitt).
Achilles gets the most screen time during "Troy," which is one of the movie's biggest problems. The lead character of a film doesn't have to be perfect (in fact, it's best when he/she isn't), but they at least have to be interesting or appealing enough that we care about them. Achilles isn't. He comes off as a violent, self-centered prima donna who doesn't know how to do anything other than kill people, and is played by Pitt with such smug blandness that I was rooting for him to injure that heel and get it over with. This is probably not the reaction Petersen was hoping for, and it doesn't help that Achilles is one of the few characters to inspire any reaction at all. However, veteran actors Cox and Peter O'Toole as Troy's king Piram make the most of their situation, and Bean's too-brief turn as Odysseus is done with such charm and cleverness that I wanted the war to be over with so I could follow his equally epic journey to get back home.
There are some good fight scenes in "Troy," both between individual characters and between armies, but they are not enough to hold interest. Petersen may have tried to condense the ten-year siege of Homer's epic, but it still ends up feeling about that long.