2 Minutes of Eye Candy Brightens A Long, Stiff Epic

Rating: 2/10 (17 May 2004)

My viewing of "Troy" was helped by my son's exegesis, courtesy of two years of Ivy League reading of Dead White Men's civilization. He pointed out the legend of Troy isn't just based on Homer but also Virgil's "The Aeneid," among other sources for the Trojan Horse legend, and he approved of Aeneas's sudden appearance in the last few minutes of the film. As I haven't yet started my summer reading of Homer and Virgil, I'll depend on his comments.
Paris's wimpiness was Homeric, especially in his use of the bow & arrow, as Homer strongly feels that archers are cowards and Real Men use spears and swords. Gee, and I thought it was Orlando Bloom being "Legolas" again from "Lord of the Rings." All the best scenes - such as Hector saying farewell to his wife, the consequences of Achilles' cousin in battle, Priam begging for Hector's body (with Peter O'Toole wiping Brad Pitt off the screen with his acting)-- were straight outta Homer.
The guy in front of me complained that a review he'd read "had given away too much of the plot." Gee, 3,000 years of literary analysis seems to have passed this guy by. But, then, as the arrow hits Achilles, there were a good portion of people who gasped and said "Oh! His 'Achilles heel'!" I couldn't help laughing when Achilles bellowed for Hector as if that's where the word "hectoring" must come from.
Leaving out the quarreling gods' manipulations of humans leaves out a good part of the legend, but my husband thought a modern audience wouldn't buy magical excuses. People got killed off who didn't die in Homer just because the leaden screenplay had turned them into figures that the audience would want dead. Of course that would leave several Greek playwrights high and dry as they dealt a lot with the aftermath of Trojan War soldiers.
I got a kick out of Helen and Paris's adultery being treated like the Tonkin Gulf incident as just an excuse for the king's imperialistic intentions. The effort to get us to sympathize with a young woman trapped in an arranged marriage to an older lout was weakened by the model's non-acting (yeah there's been a lot of jokes in reviews about how many ships this face deserved), but she managed to be quite heroic in her nude embrace against Paris's metal armor.
Pitt's spoiled surfer dude is actually very close to Homer's portrait of Achilles, according to my son, and Homer did report on his constant squabbling with the king about a woman captive. As for me, I had no doubt that she wasn't going to resist Achilles when her first sighting of him is naked and covered in sweat and the blood of her fellow Trojans. I was wondering more if Brad's glistening, very impressive body could possibly really be all personal training and had any prosthetics as I don't recall any interviews with him during shooting that had him THAT muscle-bound.
I did think the best parts of the movie were the 2 minutes altogether here and there of beefcake (including Eric Bana, who also movingly portrays Hector as a devoted family man, and a quickie shot of Bloom, though mores the pity none such of Sean Bean as Odysseus) that can wait to be seen until folks post screen shots on the Internet from the DVD, with the sound off so as not hear Pitt's wandering accent and ineffectual declamations. The major difference between this very long movie (after all the Trojan War did last some 10 years) and '50's sword-and-sandals epics is now the camera can go quite seductively a few inches lower on the hunks.
The leaden directing tried to use the bombastic music to make the action move while the dialogue was just sillily stiff. I stayed through all the credits and wasn't surprised that I didn't recognize any of the special effects shops as the cheesy boats and soldiers looked like the old "Jason and the Argonauts" movies, resonating like Pitt's voice-over in the cartoon "Sinbad" last year.
Along with the hand to hand combat, one of the few imitations of "Gladiator" that almost works, Tanja Tzarovska and the Bulgarian Women's Choir do a fair imitation of Lisa Gerrard's Oscar-winning soundtrack contributions.
As to Homer's stirring tale of war, politics, family, and loyalty that has echoed through millennia, the only lesson that all the women and at least 10% of the men will take away is that Achilles was eminently beddable. So if this film gets more people to use condoms, it will have been a success.