Troy

by John

Hollywood's love affair with the big-budget, epic drama set in ancient times has been a long one, to say the least. It dates almost as far back as film itself with D. W. Griffith's Judith of Bethulia in 1914 (predating Griffith's Birth of a Nation by a year). Films like Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and Spartacus set the benchmark for the genre and haven't been topped since, both in terms of high-quality storytelling and boldness of filmmaking. However, the current decade has been marked by Hollywood productions that have tried to emulate these classics, beginning with Ridley Scott's overrated but entertaining Gladiator in 2000. The fact that Gladiator managed to win the Oscar for Best Picture may have seemed ludicrous to some, but it certainly emboldened American studios to greenlight other computer-enhanced sword-and-sandal epics. Which brings us to Troy, Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 retelling of the Trojan War that, considering its nearly three-hour running time, provides very little in the way of entertainment, and sadly fails in nearly all aspects of moviemaking.

In the attempt to tell the epic Bronze Age myth, made popular in ancient Greece, the film portrays larger-than-life heroes of mythology, their tragic flaws, treacherous romances, and notions of honor and immortality—all the elements that have made this story endure for literally thousands of years. Achilles and Hector, Helen and Paris, Menelaus and Agamemnon are just some of the timeless characters featured in Homer's The Iliad, now given fresh, contemporary faces and voices. Although major alterations from the original story are sure to displease purist classicists, most of them are the only sensible contributions that screenwriter David Benioff makes to the film. To his credit, Benioff streamlines the story of the Trojan War considerably in an attempt to make an ancient epic palatable to modern America audiences - stripping away the role of the Greek gods, dramatically shortening the length of the ten-year war, and modifying storylines to fit present-day concepts of love and honor. The apparent reasoning for this ambitious task is that a popcorn movie such as Troy must have accessible storylines, understandable characters and motivations, and room for enough crowd-pleasing action so that the film doesn't become a ridiculously long, tedious, and self-indulgent production.

However, inherent in this highly debatable goal is, well, a tragic flaw so crippling that even the ancient Greek bards might have found it impressive. The decision to make a mainstream movie and retain as much of the original story as possible doomed Troy from the start. Making large concessions to Hollywood executives while attempting to cram the entire Trojan War and retain its key storylines all in one movie is a monstrous challenge that was bound to result in superficiality and disappointment. Benioff is forced to dumb down the Trojan War to absurd levels, relying too heavily on tiresome stock Hollywood concepts to flesh out key storylines and hastily resolve them. Because of this, the film lurches ahead in fits and starts, bogged down by recurring cycles of weak dramatic scenes that manage to arouse no serious interest in the larger story.

Scenes also reveal contemporary sensibilities much too brazenly. Achilles slices the head off a statue of Apollo, and in another out-of-place moment, Hector insults a high priest by demanding, "Bird signs? You want to plan out a strategy based on bird signs?" Other scenes seem to be blaming Priam's Pagan beliefs for the sacking of his city, showing the king jettisoning all reason and making tactical judgments based solely on perceived omens. Not only is it unconvincing to portray the revered ruler Priam as somewhat foolish and incredibly arrogant to mock social attitudes millennia after they have occurred, but these lines of dialogue and characterizations are tossed at the viewer in highlighted, bold-faced type, perhaps in an effort to steamroll over any possibility of nuance. The filmmakers might as well have inserted title cards reading, "This part will show how religion is bad" at the start of these scenes.

If some plot points seem contrived, others are simply ill-conceived to the point of absurdity. In one unintentionally hilarious scene early in the film, a messenger boy says to Achilles, "The Thessalonian you're fighting…he's the biggest man I've ever seen. I wouldn't want to fight him," to which Achilles arrogantly responds, "That's why no one will remember your name." An adult insulting a child in such an unfair way could only work as a comedic scene, but here it's improbably played as straight drama, as are eye-rollingly bland helpings of stock romance between Helen and Paris, and Briseis and Achilles. The forced subplot concerning the "sword of Troy," the weapon passed down from Priam to Paris and then ultimately to Aeneas, who's given an unnecessary cameo late in the film, seems more appropriate in a comic-book film than in what is meant to be a believable drama.

The few dramatic scenes that do work—Hector's initial argument with Paris over Helen, Priam pleading to Achilles in his tent—are written well enough, and are fleeting glimpses of how satisfying this film could have been. But such rare examples are no match for the rampant undermining of key plot points. The film's empty dialogue also doesn't help much: it either tries desperately to sound weighty but hardly contains any of its feigned substance, or is too often peppered by ham-fisted Hollywood one-liners such as, "Immortality! Take it! It's yours!"

Director Peterson seems helpless amid the fray; he displays a talent for shooting action sequences and sweeping camera shots, but when it comes to pure and simple drama, he just stumbles. The initial arrival of the Greeks, the fights between Hector and Ajax, Paris and Menelaus, and Hector and Achilles are exciting enough and all get the job done. But the director's ability to sustain dramatic tension, urgency or believability in the scenes in which character talk, as opposed to try to kill each other, seems lost to him here. The script obviously had a large hand in contributing to this problem, but there's no sign that these fundamental problems in the writing bothered Peterson. Another pedigreed member of the crew who has clearly done better work is composer James Horner, who ends up marring most of the action sequences with his largely recycled score displaying themes more fitting for a Super Bowl telecast than an epic film set during the Bronze Age. To be fair, Horner wrote the two-hour score in an amazing thirteen days after Gabriel Yared's music was inexplicably scrapped at the last minute, but the bottom line remains: like Peterson's directing and Benioff's writing, Horner's music largely misses the mark.

The acting is a mixed bag; most do well with the stilted characters and painful dialogue they are given, but others, such as Brad Pitt as Achilles and Diane Kruger as Helen, fail to hold any dramatic impact. Their thoughts or supposed emotions often remain impenetrable. Pitt manages to come alive convincingly during his showdown with Eric Bana's Hector, and that's simply not enough for the crucial role he plays. Eric Bana, on the other hand, performs best as Hector; his portrayal is brooding, tense, and, most importantly, believable. His performance ends up being the only solid anchor in the film. Brian Cox and Brendan Gleeson, as Agamemnon and Menelaus, respectively, also are reliable actors that manage to breathe some life in the mediocre proceedings.

Where Troy succeeds is in the entertainment value derived from its action and overall production values, but this is hardly worth the boredom of sitting through stretches of sub-par filmmaking that make up most of the film. Troy aims high for grandeur and spectacle, but can't help reveal what it really is: a woefully misguided and minimally entertaining production that settles for much less than the epic myth of the Trojan War deserves.