Entertaining but irritating

Rating: 6/10 (10 January 2012)

It's tough having majored in history, with a concentration on Ancient Greek and Near Eastern culture, and saying too much good about this movie. I do like it on one hand as it's action packed, has great fight scenes, and very good acting. The story moves along at a good pace and the characters are well done. It's an entertaining movie no doubt, and one that can be watched over and over and enjoyed.
On the other hand, Troy is about as much about the Iliad as The Crucible was about the Salem Witch Trials. This movie is really just a thinly veiled allegory about the Iraq War with a bunch of barbs thrown at then-President Bush ("Imagine a king that fights his own battles," and "20 thousand men come to fight for one man's greed,"). The story of poor men forced to fight an unjust war under false pretenses for one corrupt leader's greed doesn't need a genius to unravel what point it's trying to get across.
Also included in the movie is the typical Hollywood disdain for religion. Every character who claims strong belief in the gods is shown to either be misguided, foolish, or vicious while Hector and Achilles, who claim they believe in the gods but largely scoff at them, are shown as wise and having the best grip on reality. The movie also throws a barb at the idea of afterlife, suggesting that the idea of a temporary, though flawed, existence is more attractive than the idea of living eternally, which Achilles claims would cause moments to lose their preciousness. The embrace of death and the devaluing of life is prevalent throughout. Whatever a viewer's personal philosophy is on religion, the world view shown in this movie is so far removed from Ancient Greek and Near Eastern thought that it's hard to take the movie seriously at many points.
It's already been discussed in many other reviews where the movie deviated from the original story, or which characters should have been more prominent, so I won't go into that. My issue with the movie was that the creators were unable to divorce from their own world view enough to create a more authentic setting. Even if the creators wanted to make a movie without the gods as characters, it could have been done if the world view was more accurate.
All that being said, I will conclude with the way I started: It's a fun movie that, if you turn off your intellectual side, you will enjoy.