Review - Troy

Rating: 6/10

Director: Wolfgang Petersen | Screenplay: David Benioff, based on Homer's Iliad | Cast: Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger, Brian Cox, Sean Bean, Brendan Gleeson, Peter O'Toole | Cinematography: Roger Pratt | Music: James Horner | Runtime: 163 min (theatrical) | Rated: R

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I decided to watch Troy before heading to the cinema for Nolan's The Odyssey. Partly to get my head back into that world, partly out of curiosity about how a 20 year old Hollywood take on Homer holds up now that a very different one is on screens.

Troy has every ingredient it needs to be unforgettable. Great cast, massive battle sequences, one of the oldest legendary stories there is. It never quite comes together. Visually it's still impressive and there are moments that genuinely capture the scale and the tragedy of the Trojan War. But the whole thing plays more like a collection of great scenes than a consistently great movie.

Pitt and Bana carry the whole thing

The biggest strength is easily the two leads and specifically what happens when they finally face each other.

Brad Pitt's Achilles has the charisma, the arrogance and the vulnerability the part needs, and he's comfortably the film's most compelling character. He moves like a weapon and sulks like a child and both halves are convincing. Eric Bana brings a quiet dignity and honour to Hector that makes him impossible not to root for. He's the emotional heart of the film. He's a man defending a city he knows is going to fall, on behalf of a brother who doesn't deserve it. Their duel is the emotional and dramatic peak of the movie and still one of the best sword fights in modern historical cinema.

The production design deserves credit too. The sets, the costumes, the armour, the sheer size of the camps and the walls, it all looks genuinely good.

The Greeks are the problem

Where it loses me is in how it portrays the Greeks outside of Achilles.

Agamemnon and most of the Greek leadership never felt convincing as the powerful, terrifying force that supposedly dragged the greatest kingdoms of Greece into one army. Instead of coming across as calculating, intimidating or monstrous, they mostly come across as foolish, and at times almost cartoonishly incompetent. If the invading army never feels genuinely dangerous, the central conflict loses its weight. Troy should feel doomed from the first frame.

Paris, and the one thing the film gets right about him

I also wasn't a fan of how Paris was written, the character spends most of the film frustratingly passive and immature. I do appreciate that the film commits to showing him as weak and short on courage instead of trying to inflate him into a traditional hero. That's the honest version of the character. The problem is it sometimes pushes those traits so far that he becomes hard to sympathise with at all. And the romance with Helen never generates enough heat to make you believe a war started over it.

What I did like is that the movie eventually lets him find some courage. Paris is the one who puts the arrow in Achilles' heel and that's a satisfying payoff. Bravery doesn't always belong to the strongest man on the field, and the film earns that idea even after spending two hours making you impatient with him.

No gods, no fate

Like a lot of people have pointed out over the years, Troy takes serious liberties with the mythology, stripping out nearly all of the gods and the supernatural in favour of a grounded historical epic. Watching it right before The Odyssey made that contrast sharper than I expected. Nolan keeps the myth. Troy sands it off.

The verdict

Troy is an ok movie with two excellent performances and several genuinely memorable action sequences, but it still falls short of being a great adaptation. Between the underwhelming Greek leadership and the uneven handling of characters like Paris, it never reaches the emotional or dramatic heights it's capable of.

6/10