Just Another Movie

Rating: Null/10 (19 May 2004)

*lots of spoilers ahead*
I'm a Homer fan. I admit that. I know that the Iliad actually ends at Hector's funeral, and all the stuff about Achilles' death and the wooden horse and the sack of Troy, as we knew it, was from Quintus' THE FALL OF TROY (around 4th century BC). So the writing credits were already wrong, but I'm happy to see that in the closing credits they did have the line 'Inspired by Homer's Iliad'.
Much has been said about how deviated the plot was or how shallow the characters were, and I'm not going to judge on that. Knowing that Benioff basically re-invented everybody's death is enough for me - yes including Hector's, even though he did get killed by the correct person: their actual one-on-one was in fact extremely short, and Achilles never stabbed Hector to death with a sword in the Iliad.
The characters, shallow as they might appear, were more often self-conflicting than anything else. A half-God Achilles talks about how God envies human being mortal (a line that looks more like Lestat the Vampire's); a merciful Hector giving Patroclus a bloody stab with such evil hatred that I can't stop suspecting this scene would be right should Bana took off his helmet; a Helen brave enough to sneak back to the Greeks alone at night didn't mention anything like dying with Paris when Troy is being sacked; the conqueror of Greece, Agamemnon, would shout for his soldiers to charge into death without looking at enemy formation; Odysseus, the only guy who had the luck (or 'unluck') to have some original tongue-wit kept for him, was a brilliant, philosophical joker. One comment actually mentioned that bad scripting was to be blamed instead of bad acting, and I certainly found it so, for even Orlando Bloom got his moment right before engaging Menelaus with a sparkle of being totally lost.
And I don't want to mention the total demolition of secondary characters (Nestor, Patroclus, Ajax etc.) because the movie is trying so hard to 'shine' the major people.
I do love the few huge battle scenes: the Myrmidons hacked and slashed their way to the Temple of Apollo; the defence of Troy; the sneak fire attack to the Greek camp. Pretty thrilling and well-controlled. The best one-on-one goes to that between Hector and Ajax (who should be Aias in Greek, btw, because Ajax is Latin).
Peterson has his shortcoming for having no new tricks: I find in TROY shadows of LOTR The Two Towers (Troy's 1st successful defence), The Matrix (one-on-one between Hector and Achilles), The Gladiator (one-on-one between Hector and Ajax), and even Schindler's List (the sack of Troy, with no sound but a lone soprano chanting away). But this is not the major reason for TROY to fail to be truly epic. I'd forgive the re-invention of the story for the Iliad was no history either, and Peterson got his fluid mastery over the scenes, but I still see that he probably doesn't take TROY as seriously as he should have done.
The sets and settings, so much praised for being 'real', carefully polished and stunningly splendid, are seriously flawed: and that fails TROY from being great. I'll mention a few most prominent ones:

The golden statue of Apollo as an archer outside the temple looked like a copy of Hercules the Archer made by A. Bourdelle in the 1900's. That's not a flaw, but all the other statues in Troy are in the early Greek style (c. 7th century BC) which is flat, simple, straight-forward and more Egyptian-like, and this statue is like the only one that is in the late Greek style (c. 2th century BC) that is a beautiful, accurately-represented human body.

The Myrmidons called Achilles 'my Lord', a phrase that belongs solely to the English and nowhere to be found in even the English translations of the Iliad. The Greeks would use things like 'son of Peleus' or 'my King' or probably something that is closer to 'my leader'.

The technique used by the Myrmidons to breach the Trojan beach, and the Trojan defence formation, is obviously the famous 'phalanx', in which the infantry line up and use the shields as a wall, wait for enemy to close up and stab in-between the shields. This technique for attack was invented by the Spartans (who were among the ones attacking Troy) and was used so well by them that the Spartans took out Athen's army and dominated Greece during the Peloponessian War. In the movie the Myrmidons used it for attack, the Trojans used it for defence (and wonder how they learnt it from across the Aegean), and the Spartans were running blindly into the range of archers, stuck by the Trojan phalanx and getting slaughtered. Brilliant.

So much said, I'm ultimately depressed by what my friends told me - 'Don't get so excited, it's just a movie.' Well, if Peterson doesn't mind a movie that is 'just a movie', I don't either. In fact, this movie sure gives me certain likable treats, and I mind Homer only.
I'll rate it 6/10, for those inaccuracies in the parts where I expected some historical accuracy.