The rebirth of the epic movies

Rating: 10/10 (16 May 2004)

I went to see this movie the first day it came out, but I took two days to have the impressions settled , instead of rushing in to post them into the fray without giving them a thought at all. Maybe there's a lesson to learn for many who didn't do so and now are ashamed of the heated words they uttered with heads still buzzing from the movie showing.
I liked this movie. It is from a genre thought long gone and dead, the epic movies, which supposedly have no place in our age of politically correctness and financial greed. This is a movie for men, and men alone, a story about brotherhood, friendship, courage, patriotism, and above all heroism (yes, that defunct concept akin to stupidity). There's no romance to appease and bring into the cinema room the middle class housewife; there are no silly/funny sidekicks to amuse and entertain the kids. Leave them at home. It's not a movie for the pacifist or for the intellectual - there are no attempts in openly preaching the ugliness of war and no convolute psychological and moral twists of kafkian or dostoievskain nature.As such, the movie is doomed not to make 'enough' money as it caters to a very thin category - and this will undoubtedly please those critics across the world which have , for a long time , tried to fit every movie in a bed of Procust and bash it if it doesn't fit one or another rigid demand.The story *is* flatly told, and some of the lines *are* ridiculous. There is some bad acting and some absurd moments.For that , I would have given the movie an solid 8.5 but I've given it a 10 to balance the 1's and 2's a bit and to reward the risks taken by ignoring all the above described marketing wisdom.
For I am glad that once in a while movies like this are still coming out.Movies that speak about times when a man had to guard his own with a sword and a shield and he had only the support of a handful of neighbours and friends to count upon - and he valued and cherished these men above all the pleasures and delights of life. When your enemy would stare you straight in the face and would expect no quarter - for he will give you none. A time of darkness and blood undoubtedly - but also a time of heroes. When I'll need to show my boy an *ideal* of what being a man really is about, this will be one of the movies I'll show him. And when I'll need to show him how men *really* are, I'll show him "American Beauty" :-)
*I*, as a fanatic of movies accurately depicting large scale battles, could never have enough of them. And since the '60s when the large armies of figurants began to cost too much for such movies to be produced, people like me were left waiting. It's good that the CGI tech is finally coming of age and enables us to see spectacular scenes of fighting once again (it all started again with a B movie called "The Mummy", if you remember..."Gladiator" came long after that).
I tire of telling people not to blame the actors for the flatness and stupidity of some lines a dumb scenarist is placing in their mouth. As of late (see "The Lord of the Rings" ) Hollywood seems to think any 120$/h scenarist can do better in writing than Homer or Tolkien and thus it shamelessly mutilate ages-old stories at the whim of a producer who knows what "sells best" at the moment. Case in question , some of Brad Pitt's lines , which always begins with "You are " ("my best friend/the single king I am listening to/the only one I care about /the one that brought me peace/ a courageous man/ the best fighter I've fought" and so on. Now I've seen the lines being derided all over the movie's forum, but is it Pitt's fault that the scenarist lacks, of all things , talent and imagination?
How about the "sword of Troy" moment? "What's your name, you unimportant faceless teenager running scared in the dark?", "Aeneas, mylord" , "well, here's the future of our nation, you take good care of it , allright?". Why bother with the sword of Troy altogether? It's textbook inacurate and useless for the movie except for the embarrassing moment that I described above (and yes, I do count Paris partially redeeming itself by running back hurt to recover it in the face of advancing Greeks). And if you do place it in, why not let Aeneas be who he really was, a minor son of the king , but a courageous participant in the siege, and indeed, the saviour of his people.
I went through all this because I did like Brad Pitt's acting and I feel like defending it. Achille is a larger then life character. Like Aragorn in LOTR, it's impossible to play it perfectly. But if anyone can play a Greek demigod, a culmination of beauty and power, a creature of lust and war, with the lack of sensitiveness and remorse afferent, Pitt's the man. I think he did a very good job. And he *does* look incredible , a reason more to leave the wife at home :-)
But the great role was Eric Bana's Hector. I was following this guy since "Black Hawk Down", I am glad someone had finally seen his potential - and he delivers a Hector exactly as I imagined it. If he does nothing else after this, which I hope is not the case, I'll always remember his name for this one role.
They wasted Sean Bean again - I thought his Boromir was worth a secondary role Oscar nomination, well, he has even less opportunity to show how good he is in this one. But for the moments he was on screen, it was*his* screen.
Excellent Peter O'Toole - well the guy's a legend anyway , but don't you like seeing someone who kept acting for 50 years still able to raise the bar for all the crew?
Also very good Brendan Gleeson and Brian Cox - the fight with Paris was one of the highlights of the movie.And while at this, they must have had one of the best individual fight choreographers this side of "Rob Roy" - can anyone tell me who it is? See the culmination point in Hector's duel with Achilles (and the build-up to it, Hector's farewell to his wife) - now I feel that's a classic moment that will stay in the cinema's history for years to come.
Helen and Paris - I thought they were the weaker spots of the movie. While I can see that Paris's inconsistent character is clearly due to a lack of understanding from the scenarist on how(or whether) a spineless, spoiled, don-juanesque prince can grow up into a leader of his people, Helen's character was consciently diminished to make apparent the director's take on the fact that the real reason for the war was political supremacy and not the beautiful princess. While consistent with the realism that Petersen tried to maintain in the movie(see the lack of gods interference, so important in the Iliad itself), I think this was a mistake. An increase in Helen's role would have not only brought more women into the cinemas, but would have given an interesting twist to the old question of how far are men willing to go for a pair of beautiful er..., eyes.
I have only good words for the battle scenes. If there were mistakes, I didn't see them. Highlight: the Trojan phalanx pushing the Greek one, decimated by "the best archers in the world" .
Nice music, though the mix of archaic vocalisis with Hollywood like drums and tuba seemed odd at points. Better if they would have kept only the first side of it and use the primitive drums (that work so well in the Hector and Achille's final confrontation) across all battle scenes.
I thought the costumes and the scenery were great, and it did fill my imaination on how protoistoric high Mediterranean civilisation cities might have looked, as architecture and dressing code. As far as I could tell, Troy was very accurately built, looking very much like in a documentary I've seen a couple of years ago (no, I don't watch the crap they put on History Channel before each historical movie to keep the hype up).
Overall, a good men's for men movie. Grab your beer drinkin gang and see it, leave the wife and kids at home. And if you read the professional critics opinions about it, remember that these are the same guys who criticized Spielberg's "Jurasic Park" for lacking the depth of "Schindler's List". Do not compare pears and apples, the Greeks used to say: place the movie in its category and then rank it. This one, I say , stands up very high ; indeed, up with the best of them.