Rather disappointing

Rating: 7/10 (28 June 2014)

The Iliad and Achilles have always been fascinating mirrors to the western mind. This rather short version of the Trojan War is done for a popular audience and it shows. It is also done for a modern audience and it has to be short. It sure is shortened.
We could list all the essential events that are missing from the human sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter by Agamemnon himself to get from the "Gods" a favorable wind to go to war. And the "Gods" did not substitute a goat or a ram to Iphigenia as another "God" will do when Abraham was going to sacrifice his own son, though we will never know if it was Isaac or Ishmael, since there are two versions running around, one behind the other, both trying to catch their own tails in their own teeth. Human sacrifice is part of humanity, has been and will be as long as wars and the death penalty exist. The Celts burned the guilty alive in baskets hanging from trees. The Romans dipped people in boiling oil or crucified them along the roads. The medieval church burned witches and wizards at the stake, or fried homosexuals in a frying pan with oil in France, or grilled homosexuals on a grill without any oil at all in England. And what about these marvelous death penalties that do not work or take a long time to be effective in our modern civilized countries? We regret a great show like in England under kings and queens up to Elizabeth I when a convicted criminal would be drawn by horses to the Bartholomew Fair ground on the day before the Bartholomew Fair to be hanged there but not to death, brought down, drawn in the meaning of eviscerated, quartered and finally beheaded, the head being picked by the hair and directed at the joyful gleeful crowd because the brain and the eyes can see up to seven seconds after the beheading, so that the guilty victim can see the people rejoicing at his or her death.
This film is very clean indeed.
The film is also totally silent on the enormous stake of this war. They reduce it to power for Agamemnon. That's short. Troy controlled the main Indo-European route from Iran to Europe through Anatolia. That was one of the two immigrating routes that produced our modern Europe. Along this route came all kinds of goods but also knowledge like cattle raising and agriculture and metal industry (or what it was at that very beginning of the metal civilization) and religion. The Greeks wanted to take the control of this commercial and cultural circulation to Europe to make a profit on it. That is not power, that is commercial dictatorship.
The film is totally silent on the fact that the beautiful Greek religion was in the process at the time the Iliad was being written of integrating some religious and cultural elements of the people who had been in Europe since 50,000 years ago and who represent 75-80% of modern European DNA, viz. the Turkic population known as Cro-Magnon or the Gravettians, and some others still known today as the Basques. By reducing the historical stake of the Iliad and Ancient Greece, we can forget about the fact that the Indo-Europeans conquered the whole of Europe with what will never be more than a 20% minority in Europe.
What saves the film then?
In fact only two actors: Brad Pitt as Achilles and Peter O'Toole as Priam. The others are secondary and most of them mediocre. Brad Pitt gives some taste to the story, though of course the particular relation between him and his cousin Patroclus is entirely unrevealed and he even appears as a gallant person who saves a virgin teenage woman from the grubby and dirty hands of soldiers. On the other hand Peter O'Toole gives Priam the dignity and the force this old king must have had to have to be able to go and beg for the body of his own son killed in fair fight by Achilles.
The famous Trojan horse is also a nice character and the trick is surprising in the fact that it worked, at least so does the legend have it.
Finally we could say the film insists a little bit too much on couples of brothers. The two Greek Brothers, Agamemnon and Menelaus on the Greek side and the two Trojan brothers Hector and Paris on the Trojan side. And all that for a woman, Helen, who was married to an old man, Menelaus, and fell for a more or less young teenager, Paris. But do not expect any love in all that. It is only a question of possession for Menelaus and intercourse for Paris. Helen just has to play the game of satisfying the impulses of the man who possesses her. The film even manages the escape of Andromache, Astyanax, Helen and Paris, more or less and at least. Since Paris has managed to kill Achilles, he is not even a hero and the fugitives are nothing but assassins. In other words the film is doomed to have no morality.
Some beautiful battles and some very impressive ramparts, city walls, palaces and temples, but not much more, and the back side of Brad Piptt a couple of times for the perverse cheese-addicts.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU