Twenty years ago, Brad Pitt's Achilles fought Eric Bana's Hector. And we all lost.
On May 14, 2004, Wolfgang Petersen released his take on Homer's epic, and I published one of my weirdest reviews.
As I’m in the process of inventory, browsing back through two decades of archives at Looking Closer with Jeffrey Overstreet, I often cringe at my early film review writing. One review in particular — my original review of Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy — finds me trying a little too hard to be clever, seizing a metaphor and running so far with it that I’m sure my readers were groaning. I wonder if any of them made it all the way through to the end.
Reading that review again, I wonder what I’d think of Troy today. If I had more time at home with my blu-rays this week, I’d fire it up and take it out for a 20th anniversary spin.
(Hmmm — that metaphor doesn’t really work either, does it? Blu-rays spin, sure. And movies transport us. But we don’t really “take them out” anywhere, do we?)
Have you seen it recently? How do you think it holds up?
Anyway, here’s my original review, which was published at Looking Closer (without the intervention of an editor, which it badly needed) on May 25, 2004. Back when I was a still a beginner, with so much to learn.
Let’s seize a sports metaphor and carry it way, way, way too far — shall we?
The original Looking Closer review of Troy
Troy, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Brad Pitt, is a movie about a historic tournament clash of two titanic teams in the GBA — the Greek Basketball Association.
There are many all-star players on the court for this exhausting, energetic tournament, but Achilles (Brad Pitt), a point guard with a deadly jump-shot, is the superstar. He’s also a free agent. The Spartans have had him in the starting lineup for many spectacular match-ups, but they’re not guaranteed that they’ll hang on to him for this championship match. Achilles doesn’t like the Spartan coach, Agamemnon (Bryan Cox). Agamemnon has never been defeated, and his ego has swollen to Shaquille O’Neill proportions. He wants to defeat every team in the league and use his riches to secure the crown, not just this year, but for many years to come. He’s all about establishing the ruling franchise all around the Aegean Sea.
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Achilles hates Agamemnon’s arrogance. He also refuses to respect any of the corporations that own the teams. In fact, he scorns them — both Zeus and Apollo — saying that corporations aren’t all that, and it’s really the athletes themselves that deserve the glory, since they do all the hard work, suffer so much, and burn so brightly.
The Spartans are marching to take on the Trojans of Troy, a formidable team led by Coach Priam (Peter O’Toole), the only one that the Spartans haven’t defeated. The Trojans also have a remarkable record. They’ve never lost on their home court. Their defense is simply unbeatable. And they’ve got Priam’s son Hector (Eric Bana), as dominating as any power forward in the league. The imminent showdown between Achilles and Hector is going to have the sportscasters hyperventilating with excitement.
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But the Spartans may have the momentum in this tournament. They have rage on their side. If you’ve read the gossip columnists in the sports section, you’ll know that Paris, Priam’s other son, a guard who usually sits on the bench for his lack of natural talent, also happens to be a hottie with the women. He’s stolen the heart of Helen, wife of Agamemnon’s brother. So, in this war, it’s personal. Agamemnon’s happy to have that kind of scandal going on — it gives his team added emotion that they will use when they’re out on the court. If only Agamemnon can keep from alienating Achilles with his ego, victory seems assured.
Okay, as you know… I’m lying to you. Troy isn’t about basketball franchises at all — it’s an adaptation of Greek legends that have been told and re-told, most famously by Homer in The Iliad. Wolfgang Petersen’s supersized-budget version boasts a big, brawny, superstar cast including Brad Pitt (Achilles), Bryan Cox (Agamemnon), Eric Bana (Hector), Orlando Bloom (Paris), Brendan Gleeson (Menelaus), and, best of all, Peter O’Toole at the top of his game (Priam). Playing the cheerleaders — er, I mean, the hapless, fickle, hunk-worshipping women — Diane Kruger (Helen) and Rose Byrne (Paris’s “virginal” sister Breisis) do their best to show us that neither royalty nor religious conviction stand a chance against Paris’s salon-styled curls or Achilles’ oiled pectorals.
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No, this movie isn’t about sports page superstars, but it might as well be. These characters — almost to a man — are concerned about only one thing: themselves.
Achilles lives to be worshipped and remembered, and he’ll consent to fighting for a craven king in order to secure his place in history. Since the gods he’s been brought up to believe in have very little to promise in the way of an afterlife or peace, he’ll settle for earthly gold. The filmmakers present Achilles with just the sort of treatment he would have wanted. He’s a muscular war machine, so idealistically toned and conditioned that he could probably have earned far more fame and glory as a Calvin Klein underwear model than he did on the battlefield.
Cox, who was born to play monsters like this, makes Agamemnon a bile-spewing conqueror who doesn’t seem to care much if his brother Menelaus gets satisfaction for the infidelity that sets off the rivalry in the first place. He just wants to rule, to knock down enemy gods. He’s happy to keep his men content by tossing Trojan women to his men to play with like blow-up dolls.
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Menelaus? It’s hard to feel any sympathy for this humiliated husband, since he clearly doesn’t know the meaning of the word Love.
Bana’s Hector teases some of our sympathies out, in that he clearly cares about his father, his lovely family-oriented wife (played by the always-stunning Saffron Burrows), and his daughter. But he folds far too quickly after his initial protest of his brother’s hormone-driven foolishness. And when the world’s greatest point-guard challenges him to a one-on-one slam-dunk contest in front of the main gates, he goes out to accept the challenge in the name of some kind of “honor” that out-ranks the importance of his wife, child, and the people depending on him for battlefield performance. Eric Bana’s whole performance is in that angst-furrowed brow. If the script had given him more interesting material, he might have been a real highlight of the film.
Paris? A lot of fans have come to see Orlando Bloom play. It’s not hard to see why. As Aragorn, Viggo Mortensen won the admiration of those who long for integrity and leadership, but based on the buzz among fans, it seems most young women thought The Lord of the Rings was The Legolas Show. Every three-point shot Bloom fired hit its mark, even those he launched at the buzzer. Here, though, Bloom plays almost the opposite. He preens and struts for a while, but when he steps out on the court, the other team knocks the ball from his hands, humiliates him, and sends him crawling back to the bench — a tough game for Legolas fans to watch.
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No, it’s Achilles’ glory that wins out as the most memorable and remarkable factor in this tournament. Look at that effortless skill on the court! Look at the flicker of compassion he feels for Breisis, the Trojan woman who has pledged herself to chastity and service. He cares about her and her values so much, he seizes upon the first moment of weakness and violates her in a hotel room, an act for which he can never be arrested, for which he will never be held accountable or placed before a jury. And all the while, he waxes eloquent about how the management — I mean, the gods — are not to be admired or served, because only an existence like his own is really valuable. (Is it a stretch to think that entertainment like this might contribute to the prevalence of sexual abuse we see in sports-news headlines?)
Since Benioff’s screenplay focuses only on the humans, writing off Homer’s fantastic gods as mere delusions, these human legends who in the original text were clearly manipulated by petty gods are reduced to being just unethical men making bad choices.
Priam lives and dies by the will of the gods, giving his religious advisers the strongest influence in his military decisions, which vexes his reasonable son Hector. Although O’Toole gives Priam a few Oscar-caliber scenes, and indeed almost makes the film worth seeing when he pours out his love for his family in a confession to his sworn enemy, his character still repels our sympathies. He makes his decisions on the “will” of some absent god whose nature remains a complete enigma to us. Who is this Apollo he claims to worship? Is Apollo in any way worthy of worship? If so, why? Apollo’s certainly not showing up in the VIP Box at the games, where Priam perches watching the battles play out.
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Petersen’s Troy is certainly relevant. As I hope my metaphors suggest, we’re living in a culture where men still seek glory, behave as if they are above the law, spurn any real interest in spiritual disciplines or religious conviction, and engage with women only as accessories or escapist pleasures on the side, letting other priorities outshine the good of their own families and communities.
But rather than provoke us to reflect on the “gods” of our own culture, or to ponder how things might be transformed if we followed a god of love and mercy, Troy does its best to make us admire and respect these self-absorbed fools who are recklessly governed by unruly impulses. What makes the film fail in the end is its earnest attempt to act as though there was actual honor in that world of narcissism and spiritual chaos.
Audiences will come away with the “buzz” that an energetic, skillful action epic can give. Appetites for violence will be satiated, but that violence will not have been placed in any truly meaningful context. Appetites for sex will have been titillated … by male T&A rather than Hollywood’s traditional preference. And for those who didn’t get enough CGI “crane-shots” of ocean-sized armies crashing into each other in The Lord of the Rings, they’ll get a large helping of those.
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And yet there’s nothing particularly original or creative about Petersen’s direction. David Benioff’s script admirably distills some primary plot points from The Iliad and other Siege-of-Troy stories into storytelling that is somewhat engaging and well-paced. He and the cast make the faux-Shakespearean language sound convincing enough. And Sean Bean’s brief appearances as Odysseus are inspiring enough that my first comment as the credits rolled was “I want to see Peter Jackson direct him in The Odyssey! That would probably be a much better film!” Many critics are already criticizing Troy for not selecting a central character for whom we can develop sympathy. But that’s not the problem. Many films in recent years films — like 2001’s Gosford Park and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring films, and more recently The Alamo — have tracked myriad characters arcs and made compelling entertainment from them. The problem here is more fundamental: there are no sympathetic characters.
The best reasons to subject ourselves to Troy are to savor the sensational tantrums of Bryan Cox’s Agamemnon and bask in the deep pathos of Peter O’Toole Priam. “War is young men dying and old men talking,” sighs Achilles. That may be somewhat true. This movie, though — it’s about young men flaunting and old men acting.
As the clock winds down, you’ll probably find that Troy is an empty and dispiriting game, a contest of steroid-ingesting brutes who have made themselves gods in their own minds. And as the film fades out with the voice-over narration of Odysseus, waxing euphoric about how he lived in the time of these pathetic narcissists and agents of perpetual violence, we should stop to count ourselves blessed to live in a world where there are much, much greater heroes to admire and emulate.
Worth Reading…
I’m not the only one looking back at Troy on its 20th anniversary. Here’s Mitchell Beaupre at Paste Magazine, one of the few critics I follow who actually gives the film four stars on Letterboxd.
In our current era, action in cinema (particularly Hollywood cinema) tends to favor spectacle over everything else. The bigger you can get, the more CGI you can throw at the screen, the better. It doesn’t matter if your audience can make out the choreography, if they care about why the characters are fighting and what they’re feeling in those moments, if the battles tell a story as rich and dynamic as the one on the page. Is it big? Is it slick? Is it loud? If the answers to those are yes, the $200+ million budget is signed on the dotted line and shipped off to the computers where the effects are generated, slopped together on a screen and delivered to a disengaged audience unlikely to remember these sequences a day after they’ve left the theater.
20 years ago, on the other hand, Troy put immense care into every single beat of its action, and as a result these sequences drive its emotions in a way the script often fails to achieve, simply because it’s attempting to juggle so much in such a short timespan. Petersen creates a true epic, filling the screen with painterly landscapes and skies that look like they’re soaked in ash. The scale is enormous, with Petersen staging extraordinary scenes in which the hundreds upon thousands of warriors in these armies collide sword and shield on the sands outside Troy. There is, of course, plenty of CG to be found across Troy—how could there not be, with something at this large a scale? What Petersen brings is an understanding, though, that none of this bombast amounts to anything if you don’t care about the people contained within it, and thus he constantly finds moments to insert personal skirmishes into the chaos of armies colliding.