A resounding Squib!

Rating: Null/10 (28 October 2004)

There are hundreds of American films of superb quality, such as "Some Like it Hot', or "Requiem for a Dream" There are others: 'Lost Horizons' (the musical); 'The Exorcist II'; Dino de Laurentis's 'King Kong', which are so very bad that they lurch into such heady realms of camp that they become wildly entertaining in their own perverse way.
This is almost, but not quite the case with 'Troy'. With a script adapted from the 'Iliad' of Homer, (Simpson, presumably), this movie is a monumental failure on all fronts:
Performances...Orlando Bloom as Paris (Of Hilton rather than of Troy).
Helen of Troy presented more as an Amber of The Bold and the Beautiful.You want to see a Helen?...see Irene Papas in 'The Trojan Women'.
Brian Cox doing the usual British actor in Hollywood schtick as Agamemnon, (the rule is..the more morally compromised the character, the more British his accent-see Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons in the 'Die Hard' franchise.)
Eris Bana as Hector with a mid-Atlantic/ mid-Pacific accent so bogus he doesn't sound like he comes from anywhere.
Peter O'Toole taking the money and running, just as he has been doing for over twenty years. Essentially, this is the same performance he gave as Tiberius , all those years ago, with a couple of kindly smiles thrown in.(...the film was 'Caligula'...O'Toole and Gielgud claimed that they didn't know it was going to be sado-porn, but they took the checky anyway!)
....and finally, Brad Pitt as Achilles....no poofy attachment to Patrocolus for this Achilles, as he pouts and mouÃ©s his way through the film. His boyfriend has become his "cousin"...ahem! His hair is more expressive than his face. Presumably these warriors were much younger than the forty-something Pitt, but he does manage to convince as a twenty something...as long as his features remain immobile.
The music is ghastly, the design awash with anachronism...(i particularly liked the Archaic Cyprian, Classical sorta' Greco-Egyptian Trojan stuff.
The music was a pain, but as with many of these deals it was 'D'oh..the script STUPID' that did the most damage:
HELEN: Last night was a mistake!
Paris: And the night before?...and the night before that?
HELEN: I've made a lot of mistakes this week!
In Homer and the Greek tragedians, Menelaus survives the war and confronts Helen, only to be prevented from taking his vengeance when she turns the full beauty of her breasts on him. He forgives her. In this epic, Eric skewers him in the first battle. The character of Cassandra, someone who you might have thought fairly central to the story disappears in a blinding flash of Hollywood 'improvement'.
As if this wasn't bad enough, Briseis stabs Agamemnon in da neck, punk....thus removing the need for such classic characters as Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes Why change major plot points when they do nothing to improve the story? Homer's storytelling instincts leave Hollywood's for dead .
Add to this the fact that each of the 1000 ships seemed to be carrying at least 1000 men, all of whom looked like refugees from a San Diego Bears' Convention and you have a disaster almost bad enough to be a camp classic......but not quite, (my eyes kept glazing over).