BEFORE: Back to war films, and if you don't see the connection from horse films to this one, then go and read the Iliad (go on, I'll wait...). SPOILER ALERT, there's a giant wooden horse in here somewhere.
Linking from "Hidalgo", it's an easy leap from Viggo Mortensen through the "Lord of the Rings" films to Orlando Bloom. Which reminds me, I have to add those confounded Hobbit films to my list. (Should have been one film, damn it, not three...)
THE PLOT: An adaptation of Homer's great epic, the film follows the assault on Troy by the united Greek forces and chronicles the fates of the men involved.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "300" (Movie #300)
AFTER: The Spartans are loose again! Actually it's not just Spartans here, there's a whole bunch of Greek city-states, or maybe it's kingdoms, since there seem to be a bunch of Greek kings. Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, etc. And then in the other corner is the king of Troy, Priam, and his prince sons, Hector and Paris. Then we've got the soldiers, most notably Achilles for the Greeks and Ajax for the Trojans.
There are certain things you just can't get from reading Homer's story in English class - you have to set your mind to imagining 1,000 ships sailing to Troy, and tens of thousands of soldiers battling on a plain, and the carnage and the chaos involved. Now that we have CGI, all that can finally appear on screen and we can all be on the same page, so to speak.
I'm not going to review the whole plot of the Iliad - which actually started out as a poem, and only covered a few weeks' time during the 10-year siege of the city of Troy. But it covers the difficulty that Agamemnon had keeping Achilles in line, and mentions the events leading up to the siege, and some of the key battles. But the Iliad was already a simplified version of a 10-year war, and now this film is sort of a simplification of THAT, so really by now we're getting a very watered-down version of things.
One thing that really got played down here was the involvement of the gods. In the original Iliad, the Greek gods are characters, and their actions are depicted right alongside those of the humans - you had Zeus, Athena, Hera and Ares taking sides and manipulating the events. As a modern audience, are we supposed to take this seriously, or interpret this as some kind of metaphor, based on the priestesses and oracles interpreting the events on the battlefield, and determining which God was responsible for what?
I suppose it would be somewhat cartoonish to depict the gods in this film as characters, I think it was a wise decision to leave them out of it, and just show the humans fighting on the battlefield. They do mention the "will of the Gods" a lot, and when the Trojan horse is found, the Trojans say, "Surely it's an offering to Poseidon! Let's bring it to the temple of Poseidon, conveniently located inside the walled city!" And that's also a great excuse to further the plot.
This leads to perhaps a more realistic depiction of the war itself, but some things unfortunately had to be sacrificed to achieve this. Achilles was supposed to be a demi-god (his mother was a nymph) and he was supposed to be invulnerable after being dunked in the river Styx, except of course for that part of his heel that his mother held on to while dipping him. What happened to all that? Here he's depicted as a great warrior, but no mention is made of his invulnerablity or weakness - I guess he's such a great fighter that he only seemed invulnerable?
ASIDE: They also managed to whitewash most of the, umm, gay stuff out of the story. As depicted in "300" and other sources, it wasn't uncommon for these Greek soldiers to have wives and home and male companions on the battlefield. Factor this back in, and the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus takes on a whole new meaning, and read up on Achilles and Troilus sometime if you've got the nerve.
While I'm talking about the sexual habits of ancient Greece, what was up with the soldiers' wives? In the myths Zeus was always appearing to women as a bull, or a swan, or a shower of gold (heh...) and impregnating them and creating demi-gods like Hercules or Perseus or even Helen of Troy herself. So either these wives were trying to cover up their preferences for farm animals, or they needed to explain how they got pregnant while their husbands were off fighting one war or another. "Umm, honey, while you were at war, Zeus came to me, disguised as you, and one thing led to another, and now we have a son, but hey, he'll probably have super-strength or something, so that's good, right?"
And from there, it's not a big leap to explaining the Christian nativity story, is it? (Blasphemy, I know, and with Christmas coming up!) I think it was the comedian Greg Giraldo who pointed out that we have a whole religion based around a young Jewish girl who REALLY stuck to her story.
The other thing about "Troy" that I found was a little weird was the relative lack of fighting - it's the Trojan WAR, after all. It seems to me that if you've got an army of 1,000 guys on one side, and 1,000 guys on the other side, it's a little strange to make the whole battle come down to one army's best guy against the other army's best fighter, and that's going to decide everything. Maybe that's the way that Homer wrote it, or maybe that's the way it actually happened, but it's more than a little odd to have all these actors on film just sort of standing around. Isn't there supposed to be a huge battle going on in the background or something?
Yet, time and again, it comes down to THIS one guy vs. THAT one guy. Which made sense when Achilles rode up to the gates of Troy and called Hector out for a duel. It made less sense in the heat of battle to have Agamemnon take on Paris, if he was going to attack the city anyway - did anyone think he'd sail there with 1,000 ships and NOT attack? Or for one warrior to take on another in the middle of a huge battle scene and for everything in the background to come to a dead stop until one of these guys is slain. Maybe these guys are very important, or maybe it was just a cost-cutting measure. You decide.
Still, some great fight choreography, all things considered -
Also starring Brad Pitt (last heard in "Happy Feet Two"), Eric Bana (last seen in "The Other Boleyn Girl"), Brian Cox (last seen in "Red Eye"), Peter O'Toole (last seen in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips"), Sean Bean (last seen in "Flightplan"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "Cold Mountain"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "Unknown"), Julian Glover (last seen in "For Your Eyes Only"), Garrett Hedlund (last seen in "Tron: Legacy"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Bridesmaids"), Saffron Burrows (last seen in "Reign Over Me"), Tyler Mane, Julie Christie.
RATING: 6 out of 10 funeral pyres
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