Overall Grade: B
Story: B+
Acting: A-
Direction: B
Visuals: C
'Troy' not without any Achilles heels
by doughboy1110 (movies profile) May 14, 2004
152 of 238 people found this review helpful
As you walk into ‘Troy,’ you feel excited. And why not? Your about to see a $200 million epic with actors like Peter O’Toole, Brian Cox, and the highly underrated Brad Pitt. Why not? You deserve to expect to see something great, even if it’s only a popcorn movie. This anticipation will stick with you throughout the movie, and you won’t lose it until you leave the theater, and think, “Wait, was that it?”
All right, that may be a bit harsh, but it’s not a lie. By no means is ‘Troy,’ based on Homer’s classic poem ‘The Iliad’ a bad movie, but after truly great epics like the first and last installments of ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ this 150+ minute extravaganza just feels, well, empty.
The cinematography so-so. The environments look accurate and the walls of Troy give off an impression of grandeur, but in going for an accurate look, the movie looks dull and light brown, the color of the dirt and sand that this movie takes place on. If there was just a gold tint to this movie, it would have been marvelous for the eye to behold.
The acting, however, produces no complaints. Although we get many great actors mentioned above, the best performance comes out of relative new comer Eric Bana, whose only other starring role was in “Hulk.” Bana’s on top of his game as Hector, a prince who is forced into defending his brother Paris (Orlando Bloom,) and knowing he’ll probably die because of it. Everyone else acts well, but none of them truly excel, save 0’Toole in one scene where he is forced to beg his son’s murderer for his son’s ravaged body.
This ‘emptiness’ that I’m talking about comes from not caring about the characters. You don’t like Brad Pitt’s Achilles, the god-like warrior because he’s cocky and an *****. You don’t like Paris because he’s a childish wimp. The only person you like is Hector, but he’s not even in the movie the entire time. Everyone is either a bad guy or you never get the chance to learn anything about them that would make you care.
But even with all of this bashing that I’ve bashed, I still liked ‘Troy.’ The action is well done, even if there’s a bit too much of it. In addition there’s actually a really cool dynamic thrown in which is hard to explain, but is basically about the Trojan’s and the Greek’s relationships, brother to brother, cousin to cousin, lover to lover.
I feel that I owe it to the filmmakers and the reader to say that I had really bad seats, like 5th row in a gargantuan theater really bad. I can’t help but think that may have attributed to many of my complaints of this movie, I had an headache for an hour and wasn’t able to enjoy anything during that time until after the movie and I looked back on it.
So, for all I know, ‘Troy’ may have actually have been a great epic. But the enjoyment I derived out of this movie wasn’t of epic proportions.
