Disappointing

Rating: 5/10 (30 December 2005)

I found Troy an extremely disappointing movie. It is filled with dialogue scenes that remind one of soap operas. Much of the acting is deplorable. The battle scenes are great, but the pacing is flawed: the switches between dialogue, action and suspense do not work at all. The score composer seems to have had a hard time filling up the void. But the weakest point of the movie must be the story and the character development.
The movie makers decided to expunge all references to the more romantic aspects of the myth (i.e. the gods), which in itself might not have been a bad move. There is a big enough story to be told (in fact the Illiad is restricted to merely the events between the fight of Achilles and Agamemnon over Vryseida to the death of Hector) and plenty of heroes to become acquainted with, so the presence of gods is not strictly necessary. Thus, the altered story was not really a downside. However, the way the story is told is agonisingly bad, particularly because the lack of character development in the part of the Greeks is so great that there seems to be no motivation for their actions.
The Trojans, Priam, Paris and Hector and their wives all carry their characters reasonably well. But the Greek heroes are just deplorable caricatures. Achilles, for all the time he takes up on screen, only manages to come out as an adolescent whose parents don't let him play the music as loud as he wants. His wrath against Agamemnon is played out in a 10 second scene. He spends all of two minutes talking with Patroclus, and yet he is enraged when he is killed. Maybe Peterson's point was that Achilles was never really enraged.
To sum up: Visuals: 10/10 Music: 3/10 Pacing: 4/10 Characters: 5/10 Plot and dialogue: 3/10
Overall: 5