director
Wolfgang Petersen
screenwriter
David Benioff
inspired
by the epic poem by
Homer
producers
Wolfgang Petersen
Diana Rathbun
Colin Wilson
cinematographer
Roger Pratt
music
James Horner
editor
Peter Honess
cast
Brad Pitt (Achilles)
Eric Bana (Hector)
Orlando Bloom (Paris)
Peter O'Toole (Priam)
Brian Cox (Agamemnon)
Sean Bean (Odysseus)
Diane Kruger (Helen)
Brendan Gleeson (Menelaus)
Rose Byrne (Briseis)
Julian Glover (Triopas)
Julie Christie (Thetis)
Saffron Burrows (Andromache)
Nigel Terry (Archeptolemus)
Tyler Mane (Ajax)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 162m
u.s.
release: May 14, 2004
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other wolfgang
petersen films
reviewed on this website:
- air
force one
- the
perfect storm
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Like Gladiator
four summers ago, Troy starts the warm-weather season
off with a manly, retro, sword-clanging bang. But that's where
the similarity ends. Gladiator, which unaccountably won
a Best Picture Oscar, was a numbing and derivative revenge fantasy
recast for swords and sandals. Troy takes off from sturdier
origins -- Homer's great war poem The Iliad, which seems
constructed to show war in all its aspects, its exultant splendor
and its terrible cruelty. David Denby, in his appraisal of classic
literature Great Books, cites an Iliad passage describing a spear
striking a soldier "beside the nipple of the right breast,
and the bronze spearhead drove clean through the shoulder."
Homer's treatment of violence is both near-pornographic and exhilarating
in its attention to the physical.
Director Wolfgang Petersen
is aboard Troy, and after a few hit-and-miss blockbusters
(his last movie was the waterlogged The Perfect Storm),
he has made his most robust yet complex film since Das Boot,
the U-boat drama that launched him internationally. There are
many, many grand-scale battle scenes in Troy, and Petersen
stages them cleanly yet with an emphasis on the chaos of the
moment. We see individual mano-a-mano conflicts within
the larger fracas, mini-battles in which we can see that
this man triumphs because of speed over strength, while that
man wins due to sheer dumb luck. Other fights, such as the one
between the Trojan warrior hero Hector (Eric Bana) and a massive
Greek adversary, are skillfully choreographed dances of rage
and honor.
Brad Pitt may take a few critical
slings and arrows just for having been cast as Achilles, the
arrogant warrior and great hope of Greece, but he's got the moves.
Pitt has perfected a highly photogenic maneuver: he runs past
an enemy, hops up with his heavy legs swinging, and jabs his
opponent fatally in the back of the neck -- whap! Pitt
brings more to it, though; his Achilles is a great warrior who
feels used by the greedy king Agamemnon (Brian Cox, having a
grand old time) and has grown contemptuous of the very forces
that set him in motion towards glory in battle -- which means
contempt of glory itself. (In Homer, Achilles renounces the heroic
code, saying, "We are all held in a single honour, the brave
with the weaklings.") By contrast, Hector, as underplayed
effectively by Eric Bana, is a strong warrior who would rather
not fight -- he's seen enough fighting to appreciate any other
sensible but honorable alternative.
This great war poem, amusingly,
has a soap-opera impetus: Hector's brother Paris (Orlando Bloom)
runs off with Helen (Diane Kruger), the wife of Agamemnon's brother
Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson). In the movie, Agamemnon uses his
brother's rage as an excuse to start a war with Troy but really
couldn't care less about Menelaus' pride. The weak link of The
Iliad turns out to be the weak link of Troy, especially
since Orlando Bloom and Diane Kruger, twin pretty flowers, barely
suggest the transgressive passion that incinerated a great city.
Nevertheless, the story was always meant to focus on the men
pitted against each other over such a trifling matter. The face-off
between Achilles and Hector is beautifully realized, all the
more wounding because we can precisely read each man's emotions
going into the fight (even though Achilles' rage is muted in
the movie because he is now avenging his cousin, not his, ahem,
"friend").
If mesmerizing panoramas of
mass carnage don't pull you in, Troy has a major old warhorse
in its ranks: Peter O'Toole, seldom seen onscreen lately, enters
the movie humbly as King Priam, father of Hector and Paris, and
commands the screen effortlessly. When Priam meets Helen, O'Toole
compliments her beauty, then delivers a single word, "Welcome,"
and invests those two syllables with an entire movie's worth
of meaning; you can hear the subtext of Priam's exasperation
with his son, understanding of why Paris fell so hard for Helen,
and acceptance of whatever this illicit love might bring to his
nation. "He was born to end lives," someone says of
Achilles, and O'Toole was born to kick movies up another notch.
Seventy-two now, O'Toole reportedly balked at accepting a Lifetime
Achievement Oscar because he hoped to earn another real
Oscar someday. If the gods are kind -- and if the Academy's memory
goes back to May -- he will.
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