60 percent ego, 40 percent plot

Rating: 4/10 (28 July 2004)

Prior knowledge of the Iliad or any of the arguably better Iliad adaptations will damage your perceptions of this film. Most of the film is spent subverting the audience to a propagandist vision of Troy and Brad Pitt as Achilles, Eric Bana as Hector. Wolfgang has done a great disservice to the story of Troy by stripping it of its flesh. The Gods have been removed, as have principal characters, as well as principal fates. <>All that's left is a typical movie arc, where the entire Trojan war is a parabolic 3-hour curve in which the beginning of the curve is at Paris' eloping with Menelaus' wife, Helen, the middle peaks with the climactic confrontation of Hector and Achilles, and the end is some bullsh*t where Paris escapes with Helen and Achilles kills his own king. You know it's going to suck when principal characters (like Menelaus) are killed off just to expedite the movie, even though their insight is crucial to the remainder of the story.<>
I squirmed and sat bored throughout the entire movie. Troy certainly fits the "2004" updated rendition of the Iliad, as it is earmarked by the completely fake and mitigated violence/storytelling depth that made the Lord of the Rings such a sell to the 9 years and up film crowd.
Wolfgang cutting the fat from the story leaves it with nothing. Troy is a very typical Hollywood movie with shallow lead characters delivering subpar performances in war movie that tries to achieve realism, but only manages to slaughter its titular mythology. There's no depth at all: no insights into actual Grecian warfare, no proper evincement of character, no historical depth to make up for all the things that Wolfgang cut. I spent the entire movie trying to be convinced that Brad Pitt was Achilles, that Eric Bana was Hector. I failed.
When Braveheart was released, the folk hero William Wallace was portrayed in all memorabilia with the likeness of Mel Gibson, a subtle honor to a great movie and a man whose documentation is even more scant than Achilles. Will Brad Pitt, just to name one of the principal characters who participated in this disastrous PG-13 watercolor portrait of ancient Greece, ever be so intimately tied to Achilles? Neither his performance, nor this movie, is memorable enough. We're still waiting for an excellent and classic filmic adaptation of Troy, and this, my friends, falls far, far short.