A movie that fails to work

Rating: 3/10 (3 May 2004)

I saw a screening last week. The actress who played Briseis attended, for what that is worth.
The movie is a disappointment.
Brad Pitt and Eric Bana do not convey the greatness of their characters, Achilles and Hector. Bana, slightly goggle-eyed, looks like a scared teenager in council with his father and Troy's elders, not the rock on which the Trojans rested all their hopes of survival. Achilles is a hard character to play, because in the Iliad his obsession with honor and standing, his pride and selfishness (he prays for the Greeks to be defeated to avenge a slight from Agamemnon) makes him very unlikeable to a modern audience. The Greeks nevertheless revered him, because he was more like a god than a man -- stronger, faster, more deadly, even more handsome. Pitt has the good looks and conveys the unlikeability, but not much more. (Wow, is he built, though. His body looks computer-generated.)

The plot is not well-structured. The events in the Iliad occur over just about 40 days in the tenth and final year of the war and are almost exclusively concerned with the rage of Achilles, which causes him to first leave the battle (with dire consequences for the Greeks), and then rejoin it (with disastrous consequences for the Trojans). The movie, by contrast, tries to tell the whole story of the war -- the event that starts it, the marshalling of armies, the Greek landing, Trojan retreat, Trojan advance, Achilles and Hector, the Trojan horse, etc. Among other things, the filmakers have to shrink the Trojan War from ten years to, by my count, 17 days (which includes a 12-day truce). Much worse, the movie repeatedly builds (or tries to build) to an emotional peak, then drops down and drags for a while, then builds again. There are only so many emotional peaks a movie can carry its audience along for. After a while you just want it to end.
The large-scale battle scenes are impressive, but they suffer by comparison to those in Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson has made it pretty difficult for directors of epic movies for the forseeable future). I saw "The Passion of the Christ" recently, which I think cost about 1/5 as much as "Troy", but nevertheless made me believe I was seeing first-century Jerusalem. This movie, by contrast, never makes me believe I was seeing ancient Troy. (I am not talking about period details. The statutes and architecture are too modern and there are coins, which didn't exist then, but that doesn't bother me. Homer also has many anachronisms in his epics. But he nevertheless manages to convey an overpowering sense of a distant, ancient age of heroes (the Trojan War (if it happened at all) took place hundreds of years before Homer's time (if there was a Homer). This movie just doesn't do that.)

A number of supporting actors are better than the two leading men. I particularly liked Peter O'Toole as Priam and Orlando Bloom as Paris. Many of the characterizations depart from those found in the Iliad. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as the new characterization works. But in some important cases it doesn't. I don't care very much about the movie's Patroclus, and I don't get the sense that Achilles does either. If you know the Iliad, you know that is a very serious shortcoming indeed. If you don't know the Iliad, you'll still feel how it hurts the movie.
I love Homer, and I had hopes for this movie. I don't think my expectations were excessively high -- the Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the greatest things ever written, and it's probably impossible for any movie to do them justice. But this movie doesn't even come close.