TROY (2004) **1/2 There is probably no more obvious casting in the history of Hollywood than Brad Pitt as Achilles. He was born to play the part. Unfortunately this is merely a good-and at times painfully spotty-performance. I would not have accepted it as director. He would have to repeat the course. It's an enjoyable movie mainly because what Homer wrote was so great. They don't take liberties with his work in any fatal manner-I know it's impossible to fit everything in-but they manage to mess it up just the same. It's like they went through and picked out the 150 best lines of dialogue, and then wrote a script stringing them together with as little between as possible. They would have been better off just picking out five, and actually setting them up. Nothing is set up, when Patroclus dies we've hardly even met him. And yet that's supposed to be the catalyst for catharsis like the world has never known. It's all too much like that, like they had a billion dollars and some serious actors, and wanted to make a soap opera based on one of the classic tales in the history of literature. I can see how Diane Kruger made the short list for Helen of Troy: the role demands outrageous beauty by even Hollywood standards, and she looks enough like Barbie that everyone's going to think she's beautiful, but unique enough that many will consider her a classic beauty. But Helen is not supposed to be a simpleton, and Diane has difficulty sustaining even the soapy standards of everything around her. The music never fits. It's pompous to the point that you understand that they're trying to be dramatic, but it lacks even the schmaltz gravitas of Danny Elfman's worst stuff. There had to be some traditional Greek music that would have fit, or Ry Cooder would have done way better, or Neil Young feedback for the battle scenes, or just a bunch of Irish folk variations throughout. The production values are suspect, but the goals inexcusable. I kind of like how they've made Eric Bana's portrayal of Hector more sympathetic, but he's no more consistent than Brad, and even more rarely exhibits the depth demanded. Speaking of Brad, I know he can be tough, I've seen Snatch., I've seen Fight Club, he's even tough in the backlit scenes of Legends of the Fall ; here somehow Wolfgang Petersen has him in all these shots where you wonder how his hair got such a weird color, and Peter even discovers an angle (and repeatedly returns to it) where Brad facially resembles Kelsey Grammar! I mean, what Sergio Leone could have done with the Brad and Eric face shots going into that battle scene...what some music could have done. It's not like they were hurting for cash, but even the costumes somehow resemble high-rent Halloween costumes! And Orlando Bloom as Paris...I'm not willing to believe he would have crawled for his life, because there's no way he would have lasted that long. That kid couldn't have survived a shower! Peter O'Toole is the only consistently good performance, there are scenes where he captures the sense of mysticism left vacant when the writers decided to ignore the gods, and he catches the immense tragedic implications of it all...he's the one lead who looks like he actually belongs in this film. So anyway Homer wrote some great commentaries about heroism and fate in The Illiad and they're reflected here; it's not that it's a bad movie, it's even a good movie, just that it should have been so much better, and the mistakes are so obvious.
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