fajrdrako | Troy (Reply)

Among many other things I did on the weekend, I went to see Troy. Bottom line: I found it colourful but supremely unintelligent. Not as much fun as Hidalgo, which may not have had better history but at least didn't take itself seriously. I had half-hoped that it would be like Pirates of the Caribbean, and be far better than I'd expected from the publicity. Sadly, the only surprise was that the producers and actors spent all that time and effort on a movie so lacklustre.

My various and assorted reactions:

Orlando Bloom as Paris was a pretty nitwit and a wimp. Most disappointing. He seemed particularly bad in contrast to all the other brave macho manly men.

I chuckled at the review that said Helen's face wouldn't even have launched a dinghy. She looked okay, I thought, in a vacuous way, and her deadpan delivery of lines didn't help much. The woman I liked - and liked very much indeed - was Saffron Burrows as Andromache. I liked her enough to perk up and become interested every time she appeared. She was gorgeous. Briseis was okay - I didn't like her much but she wasn't objectionable, and her part in the plot was reasonably interesting.

I only ever saw Brad Pitt once before, as the horrible villain in Kalifornia. I thought his acting there was superb. I thought his acting was superb here, too. I still don't like his looks, though he made the most of his better qualities, e.g., thighs. His free-thinking, tough, honest Achilles was wonderful and had more personality than I ever imagined or expected. His rivalry and squabbling with Agamemnon was far more interesting than anything else that was going on in the whole movie. Overshadowed his rivalry with Hector, actually.

Erik Bana as Hector was gorgeous and interesting. Yes, I like the heroic types - and he had a big nose. I liked the way he was protective of Paris; true to his family loyalties even against his better judgement.

I loved Peter O'Toole as Priam and Sean Bean as Odysseus. I would have liked to have seen more of both of them.

The script was awful. It ranged from meaningless Hollywood cliché to overblown pompousness and back again. I never expected insight into Homer but I didn't expect such a mangling of history and literature all in one blow. It shocked me that the whole Trojan war here was fought in less than a month.

The sets looked half-Assyrian, half-Egyptian. Not very Greek at all. The costumes were pure Biblical epic - I kept expecting to see David and Goliath. The accents were... varied. All in all, I saw nothing particularly Greek in any of these people. Not in style or culture. When we first see the Spartans, they are carousing and feasting; Spartan women are wearing colourful sexy outfits and dancing in bangles among the men at the feast. Everyone is drinking and eating lavishly. Harry whispered to me, "This is Sparta?"

It seems a little coy (or dishonest) in this day and age to pretend Achilles and Patroclos were not lovers, and the movie dealt with that by not mentioning it. This didn't bother me, though normally I would find it very annoying. Though the script was free of homoerotic elements I thought the actors and their acting made it clear enough that Patroclos was jealous of Briseis and went into battle to get Achilles' attention back. Not just in the matter of sex, but in various other aspects I thought the script and action did a lot of whitewashing of the subject matter.

Somebody told me that the Trojan Horse is not in the Iliad. If not, where does it come from?

It was fun to see Julie Christie (of all people) as Thetis, in a watery sort of scene. I was confused about Achilles' lineage; I thought from a reference in the beginning that we were supposed to think he was the sun of the god (Poseidon? I'm forgetting the original story), but they talk so much about his father being a Greek king that I decided he was mortal after all. And how, in Homer, did Achilles actually die?

For the first third of the movie I was looking for Cassandra and Hecuba and wondering where they were. After a while I stopped looking for them.

I wasn't sure what point the movie wanted to make. I couldn't pick out a central theme. The plot wandered. Was it about Achilles' search for glory and posthumous fame? Troy's noble fall and the triumph of barbarism? Paris discovering maturity?

Given that they butchered Homer - I haven't read Homer, but it didn't jive with the secondary sources I've read - I wondered at the inclusion of Aeneas. That looked tacked on and irrelevant, and I wondered what proportions of the audiences would even know who Aeneas was. (Unless he was a character in "Xena". Was he?)

I didn't like the CGI work at all. It looked phoney to me. The scale was all wrong.

I kept wondering where all the slaves were.

For all my snarky comments about the unGreeklike sets and costumes, I loved the Greek ships.

Lots of nice manly thighs made up for most of the defects, but not the dull and uneven script. I thought "Gladiator" had a dumb script too, but the focus on Maximus (and Russell Crowe's performance) compensated. "Troy" was too diffuse, so it really didn't fit together, though in some of Achilles' scenes it came close.