Its desire to be great is its doom, just like it was Achilles'.

Rating: 6/10 (28 June 2006)

For a big-budget Wolfgang Petersen production, it had the potential to be so much better. All he needed was to lose a few things. Brad Pitt, for one.
Watching this 163minutes (too) long adventure, I did enjoy quite a few parts. The foreshadowing of the attack on Troy by the Greeks was handled in a similar manner to the Helm's Deep battle in LOTR: Two Towers, mostly because it featured a strong fortress-like wall and a tense build-up that culminated in a very fierce battle. I liked this part; I thought it was well-done.
Other than that, Troy simply doesn't hold one's interest; it is too long and tries too hard to be "epic" without succeeding. I really can't emphasize enough just how wrong I think Brad Pitt is for the part of Achilles. Sure, he's got the vanity part down alrightbut he's still too much likeBrad Pitt. It's annoying and distracting.
Diane Kruger as Helen of Sparta/Troy truly is the face that could launch a thousand ships for me. Yet her beauty is rivaled to that of Rose Byrne's and Saffron Burrows'. The casting directors should definitely have gone with less pretty girls to emphasize Diane Kruger as Helen and make it more believable that 50,000 Greeks would set out to fight for her. Now, with all the gorgeous girls everywhere, it's almost a little overblown. It goes back to what I said about "trying too hard" and it seems as though this is Troy's inherent flaw. I guess that could relate to the themes of Achilles in the Iliad. Achilles' desire to be great and glorified leads to his doom, just like Troy's desire to be a great, epic film leads to its failure, but I sincerely doubt the filmmakers had this irony in mind. In fact, I'm quite sure they mostly had box-office success in mind and made this film according to the standard recipe for Hollywood adventure.