How do you like them Golden Apples?

Rating: 6/10 (2 July 2005)

The movie is colossal, spectacular, stupendous, gongoristic, monumental, and secular.
What happened to the GODS? I mean the whole thing started with Eris and that damme golden apple and vain Aprhodite -- whom I would not want backing me in a war, I'll tell you. Yes. It's a godless movie, no doubt propagated by some leftist Commies in Hollywood. Oh, sure. Lots of people entreat the gods, or propitiate them, or insult them, but does anything happen as a result? They don't. No, they don't. You may call it secular humanism but I call it hubris.
The best thing about the movie is Peter O'Toole. He practically gives acting lessons to the leads. Brad Pitt I feel kind of mixed about. He's not bad actually -- humorless, narcissistic, and relentless except when he's in a snit. By the way, didn't Achilles hide in drag among the women in order to avoid being drafted? Maybe not. My memory is a little rusty after all these years. I didn't have a problem with Brad Pitt, the actor, but rather with his role as written and directed. We already know that Achilles is full of love for himself, but must we be too? Pitt is all pumped up and musclebound and the camera gives us more than one shot of his bare behind. That's okay as far as it goes because the Greeks were pretty casual about nudity ("gymnasium", etc.) but then, well -- why not a bit more of Helen too? Or Briseis? What's the matter with their behinds?
Speaking of Briseis, the erstwhile temple virgin with whom Achilles falls in love, brings up a couple of creaky places in the construction of the story. Alright, they don't have to hew too closely to Homer's original. He probably didn't hew very closely either. After all it was an oral tradition and there wasn't too much to hew to. But the introduction of the romance between Achilles and Briseis, which I don't remember being in The Iliad, almost turns the movie into a Harlequin romance punctuated by scenes of battle and intrigue. In fact all the romances are handled through dialog that is positively an embarrassment. Near the beginning Paris sneaks into Helen's room and she says, "You shouldn't be here." Paris: "That's what you said last night." Helen: "Last night was a mistake." I kept waiting for one of the lovers to turn to the other and say, "We have to talk." At least the Helen/Paris romance was required. Her sleek Teutonic beauty is what launched those thousand ships. But Achilles and Briseis is off track. It's the story of a man who "found himself" through the love of a good woman. (Ho hum.)
It turns out, according to this version of the story, that Paris didn't shoot Achilles with an arrow before the walls of Troy after all. Instead Achilles is killed because he foolishly rushes around the burning palace searching for Briseis, his missing love. When Briseis yields to him and agrees to leave, he sweeps her up in his brawny arms and Paris, mistaking this for a coerced abduction, plugs him in the heel. There follow the few last words to his lost love, from a man who died tragically just as he found the true meaning of life. The real Achilles must be begging the boatman to take him back across the Styx so he can strangle the writers.
Visually of course the movie is overwhelming. Maybe too much so. We see a horde of about two thousand Greeks in dark armor plodding relentlessly towards Troy, while ominous music throbs in the background. It owes something to the score for Alexander Nevsky, but if you're going to rip somebody off it might as well be Prokoviev. The fact is, there are too many guys. In The Iliad Homer gives us two lines of warriors -- the Greeks and Trojans -- shouting insults and shaking spears at one another until some of them rush out of line to do battle. This puts the spotlight on individual mano a mano combat, like that between Hector and Patroclus. But when you have a myriad of men hacking away at each other, who's to notice, and stop to watch, when two heroes swear off against one another?
It's not a bad movie at all. Rarely does one's mind drift. But why did the writers try to hammer that round peg of a romance into the square hole of the narrative itself? Is Brad Pitt such a bustier-melting hunk that someone thought the audience wanted to see his tender side? And his backside as well? Was he so expensive that somebody figured he ought to be given more lines of dialog? And get that stupid helmet off so we can all see how handsome he is? I was reassured to see that the guys I enjoyed and admired most in the original -- the morally upright Hector and the clever, ironic Odysseus -- receive fair treatment here. I never liked Paris much. I always thought of him as a handsome namby-pamby and an idiot to boot. Happily he doesn't get much better play in the movie.