Troy - 6.5/10

I’ll admit, I was waiting for Troy with some degree of anticipation. Given the success of the Lord of the Rings franchise, I had hoped that Peter Jackson’s genius in using CG and live action to create epic battles might somehow be duplicated by others. Sadly, this was not to be the case.

First of all, everyone knows what the story is. If they don’t then in my opinion, they ought to go back to whatever rock they’d crawled out from under. For those who want more details of what happened in the Trojan War, I highly recommend Wikipedia.com. Now it’s important to note that Troy is “inspired by” and “loosely based on” Homer’s The Iliad. Audiences expecting to see members of the Greek pantheon are in for a disappointment. Troy gets rid of all that – unwisely, I feel. Instead, it reduces the movie to a foundation of base emotions – lust, love, honor, greed, ambition, etc. This movie is all about the men (and women) who went through the war. As an aside – the war itself lasted 10 years, but has been reduced to a few weeks here.

The biggest surprise in the movie was Eric Bana’s portrayal of Hector (the brother of Paris). A bloody good piece of acting as the warrior who knows he is about to die yet goes to face it with honor & dignity. The biggest disappointment is – no surprises here – Brad Pitt’s muscle-for-brains Achilles.

The epic battle sequences are rather ho-hum, understandably. Had this movie come out before The Lord of the Rings, it would’ve been hailed as path-breaking. Instead, it comes off as a pale imitation of Helm’s Deep. The one-on-one battles – Hector vs. Ajax, and the better one of Hector vs.

Achilles – are well choreographed, and go a long way in redeeming some of the other faults of the movie.

I wouldn’t call this movie a must-see; some may choose to wait for the DVD. I’d wager that fans of Lord of The Rings might find this movie somewhat enjoyable, but doubt it’d hold much appeal for others.