Troy Redux

I saw the clunker Troy while home for Thanksgiving. My brother has this killer DVD collection, so I usually just wait to see what he's got rather than pay Blockbuster. I'm glad I didn''t spend any money on this one.


Troy wasn't terrible, just uninspired. And it really didn't do the origianl Homeric Epic any justice at all. I did think Brad Pitt's Achilles wasn't bad. He was a Heroic Age guided missile, and the first fight presented him exactly as such. Agamemnon releases Achilles as a precision guided munition, and eliminates the opposing army's champion and ends the war in a single subclavian stab of shock and awe.

I thought that was an interesting modern interpretation of the character. Too bad he comes off as such a sullen, prissy boy second-guessing his purpose for most of the rest of the film. It's like a JADM Satellite Guided Bomb saying to the loader, "I know I'm purpose built to incinerate Saddam's underground bunker, but I'd rather be reading Jane Austen by the pool."

To be fair, the Iliad has Achilles sulking in his tent for much of the war precisely because he is a prima donna. But this film is so taken with the idea of using big budget effects to recreate the time and place, and having big name stars doing the heavy lifting, that the scriptwriters must not have been paid to provide any characterization. Achilles motivations remain fairly unclear beyond a rather standard: I'm doing it for fortune and glory.

OK, than why sit out the war? What does it matter if you think Agamemnon is a blowhard, so long as he gives you the chance to fight?


The film's answer is that the hardened Achilles has fallen in love with Briseis, a Trojan princess captured during his practically one-handed amphibious assault of the Trojan shore.

Unfortunately for Hollywood, some of us actually read the classics. Achilles was kind of a "man's man," if you know what I mean. Briseis was the sticking point in the Achilles/Agamemnon alliance in the book, but it was an argument over chattel, not love. Achilles was in a long-term relationship with his cousin Patroclus.

So when the film's rote chronology eventually reaches the point when Hector accidentally kills Patroclus, the audience is left to wonder why Achilles is so beside himself with grief that he stops the entire war to challenge Hector and hold 12 days of games. (This last pronouncement is especially jarring to modern sensibilities.)

They tried. They really did. The movie looks good. The actors are all pretty. The Classical "kung fu" fights are pretty good. The source material is first rate epic stuff. But it clunks. You can hear the film sputter and cough underneath the shiny hood.

Stuff like this still has the power to spark the imagination. But it simply doesn't translate to modern media. Two hours and change is no way to present the Iliad. CG generated armies are nice, but can't hold a candle to the spectacle of Troy's myriad of Asiatic allies mustering in the mind's eys while reading the verse.