All Fluff and Grandeur

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2005)

I waited a long while to see Troy expecting it to be worth the wait. It's too expensive to see at the theaters and too expensive as a DVD, but quickly nabbed up as a previously viewed DVD at my rental place. Truth be told, I could have waited longer. A massive amount of creative license went into this movie. It is a highly stylish and visually stunning movie with epic written over it, but that's all it has. The inaccuracies and contradictions are enough to make you cringe. Wolfgang Petersen's attempt to create a historically factual film without the fantasy ingredients is noble, but if you want a full story of the Trojan War, you need to include Protesilaus, Penthesilia and the Amazons, Philoctetes, Diomedes, Cassandra, Pyrrhus, Aeneas, Anchises, Hecuba, Scamander, Astyanax, Oenone, Lycus, Idomeneus and a host of other major characters. There's too much talk of legacies and glories and a vague overview of missing incidents that were dropped from the screen play. The war lasted ten years, not a month. As far as the cast, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom provide fair and noble performances, but Achilles is played by Brad Pitt as a restrained pretty-boy psycho with Hitler tendencies rather than the noble warrior he was. Peter O'Toole, an Irishman, a Celt, enemy of the Romans, plays Priam; Zeus must be loving that! Brian Cox seems miscast as Agamemnon and portrays him with the same personality of all his other movie roles. Lastly, I have a lot of offense with Diane Kruger playing Helen; she looks more like a movie star than a princess. Sienna Guillory from "Helen of Troy" with her more natural beauty would have been a better cast choice. "Troy" is pretty much all grandeur, but it lacks the romance of "Helen of Troy" and the spirit of "Odysseus" with Armand Assante. Once someone merges the best ingredients and cast choices of those movies, then and only then will we see a truly great Trojan War story!