Troy: They did WHAT to the Classics?!

Rating: 1/10 (27 May 2004)

Troy was an offensively bad film; even TNT's atrocious Helen of Troy miniseries was better and more accurate.
First, the script. The screenwriter (David Benhioff) was trying very hard to not imitate Gladiator, but the 2000 Best Picture winner must have been a little too prominent in his mind. Some of the lines were extraordinarily similar to ones from Gladiator, extremely silly, or clichéd. Most laughable was when Paris and Helen fantasize about running away and living a quiet life together on a farm.
And there were some incredibly gratuitous moments: when we first meet Achilles, he's naked and sleeping in his tent with two nude women. And every time he entered his tent, he took off his armor and started walking around naked. Really, why?
Furthermore, nearly every single character was extremely flat, a weakness that was amplified by poor acting.
Taking creative liberties is understandable, but holy Hera, there's a limit when it comes to using the story that is the basis of Western literature for your inspiration. For example, the war does not last ten years-more like three weeks. Hector and Andromache's son is a baby at the beginning of the film, and a baby at the end! Among the offensively glaring canon changes are that some characters are killed who shouldn't be: Menelaus is killed by Hector, eliminating Book IV of the Odyssey. Other characters are killed by the wrong people: Agamemnon kills Priam. Oops, there goes Pyrrhus! Without him, Books II and III of the Aeneid don't make sense, nor do several lines in Hamlet. Briseis kills Agamemnon; So much for the King of Kings going home and getting axed by his wife, eliminating the Oresteia! Also unpleasantly astounding is the great number of missing important characters: such prominent Trojan royals such as Hecuba, Cassandra, Deiphobus, and Polyxena aren't even mentioned. Other disgraceful changes: Andromache flees to Mt. Ida with baby Astyanax, and is not led off into slavery by Pyrrhus. Bah, we don't need no stinkin' Trojan Women. In addition, neither Cassandra nor Laocoon warns about the wooden horse; Paris actually quietly suggests burning it. Achilles survives up to the fall of Troy, and is actually one of the men coming out of the horse! Finally, with Menelaus dead, Paris and Helen are free to flee to Mt. Ida during the fall of Troy to presumably build the previously mentioned farm.
The really bizarre thing about the script was that despite the listed inaccuracies, there were several things that only those well-read in the Classics would understand: at the end of the film, when several Trojans are fleeing to Mt. Ida, Paris stops a teenage boy who is helping a limping old man to flee. Paris asks the boy what his name is, and he says 'Aeneas.' Paris then hands him the made-one has read the Aeneid, this reference would be lost. Never mind the actor playing Aeneas is too young to be married to the eldest daughter of Priam and have a son. After all, do you really need Ascanius to rule Alba Longa for thirty years? Nah.
There is a rumor that Gladiator's Ridley Scott was the first choice to direct this film, and Wolfgang Peterson was third string. Just comparing the two directors' fight sequences, it's easy to see why: there was a little too much panorama; the armies looked small and scattered. One really didn't get the feeling of how down-and-dirty Bronze Age war was; men would be so close to each other, they could barely move.
Random irritating fact number #96: Menelaus was pronounced 'Meneh-louse.'
The celebration around the wooden horse is nothing short of hysterical. Of course, the Trojan women are doing a grapevine step, which was also in the Crayola Kids Adventures: The Trojan Horse. Enough said. And of course, there was a random guy doing back flips-and the mob even made space for him. Ah, movie cliché #987. The film's score was abysmal. Apparently, Peterson rejected the score that Cold Mountain's Gabriel Yared took a year to compose, and instead asked James Horner to write him one in three months. One could often recognize half the scene-inappropriate music as being from other films. There were some good things about this movie. It was somewhat well-cut together-it didn't feel like a long three-hour film. Furthermore, the fall of Troy was generally well done; one felt close to the realistic action.
The casting director for this film should be blacklisted. It was an awful idea to cast Brad Pitt as Achilles. He was handed the only character that was scripted to possibly have any depth, but his performance was entirely wooden, and he poor delivered the already-awful lines. Newcomer Diane Kruger as Helen was a boring, uninspired performance. She's pretty, but not beautiful to be the Face that Launched a Thousand Ships, and was easily outshone by Saffron Burrows and Rose Byrne. Although Orlando Bloom is generally a bad actor, he was perfectly cast for the role of Paris: he didn't act, he was simply playing himself. Peter O'Toole as Priam was amazing. His reaction to seeing his first-born son being slain and then his body defiledhis futilely running through burning Troy with a sword in hand, gazing upon all the things he's built being destroyed, and his bargaining with Achilles for Hector's body was incredibly powerful. The film was sprinkled with other great performances, such as Eric Bana as Hector, Brian Cox as Agamemnon, Saffron Burrows as Andromache, and Julie Christie in her two-minute stint as Achilles' mother Thetis, and Sean Bean who was Odysseus.
The sets were especially spectacular, and the biggest-and one of the only-problem with the costumes was the use of IRON armor in the BRONZE AGE, and some overzealous tie-dyeing of other costumes.
There are films that are enjoyable to watch, films that are insanely boring, and films that are so bad that they're fun to watch. In general, on an absolute value scale of -10 to 10, this film gets a -7. It's like watching a train wreck: you stare in fascinated revulsion. There are elements of the film that could be better in every department, and improvement in any of these categories would have grossly improved the film. It is truly depressing to realize that those who are not read in the Classics will take this movie as fact.