roy!

Quickly stated, It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good. I'd give it 2.5/4 stars, which isn't quite good enough to recommend it. If you want to see it, go see it and you won't be too disappointed. If you're not that interested, skip it and you won't lose sleep over the decision.

Want more detail, courtesy of my categorized scoring system?  Here you are:

Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 6
Action: 5
Eye Candy: 8
Replayability: 5
Overall: 5.5

The movie looked great. The special effects were acceptable, the sets and locations and costumes were fine, the actors and actresses looked good and appropriate for their parts. The problems were with the plot, which wasn't very involving or grand, and the characters, who were basically boring. These turned the story, potentially the strongest element, into mush. There weren't really any good guys or bad guys, and while it was nice to see the point of view of both sides, the end result was that I didn't care who lived or died. And that was despite the fact that I honestly didn't know who was going to live or die, since I last read the source material around 8th grade, and since the screenplay made so many major changes to it that my vague memories were pretty much useless anyway.

I wasn't bored, but I was never thrilled either, and I found the ending pretty disappointing. The movie didn't really build up to a huge conclusion, and the ending was all about death and destruction and failure and escape, rather than triumph for anyone. It just sort of ended; I didn't feel satisfied with the resolution, or saddened by the tragic deaths, or much of anything else.

Also, if you're gay or a non-gay woman, you'll probably enjoy the steaming hot, hairless chested man porn that Troy serves up repeatedly. Pitt is naked with all but his cock showing at least half a dozen times, and whatever workout he did for six months to put on the muscles, I want it. He looked like a Greek God. Which was, of course, the whole idea. Eric Bana, previously scowling, puny, and forgettable in the Hulk and several other movies that no one saw, was a big-pec'ed hunk in Troy, and repeatedly topless. Even little skinny Orlando Bloom was buffed up quite a bit, and cut a saucy figure in his one topless scene. And besides those principles, there were dozens of other muscled, freshly-shaven men, stomping about in sandals, leather skirts, and not much else.

The female flesh is displayed in far lesser quantities, with just a few bare backs/butts shown from the side when various whores are lying around in various beds. You don't expect anything more than that from a PG-13 film, but there was more manporn than I expected, and more gore as well. A lower budget film with the same number of blood-spurting stab wounds, gasping death scenes, and bloody faces would assuredly have received an R rating in the US, and I was surprised at the amount of nudity they worked in as well, even if it was just backs and sides on display.  There wasn't so much nudity and violence that I'd consider it a selling point, but it was about as much as they could possibly get away with and still get the PG-13 rating.

There are some minor spoilers in the remainder of this review.

Part of the feeling that it didn't matter who won was due to the greatly-shortened time frame in the film. In the myth/novel/history/whatever, it's a ten year siege. The attacking Greeks surround and besiege Troy for ten years, cutting off food, water, reinforcements, etc. They try and try and try to break the walls, fight countless battles, but can never get inside. So when they give up and sail away and leave the huge horse statue behind, an apparent gift to the god Poseidon, it's a weighty, amazing event. Imagine how happy the people of Troy would be after a decade of constant threat of invasion and death?

In the movie, the entire siege lasts about two weeks. The Greeks sail up, take the beach in five minutes thanks to the super skills of Achilles, and then everyone lands. The next morning they march up and attack, are beaten back, take a day off, attack again, stop halfway, Achilles has a one man grudge match the next day, then nothing happens for twelve days (there's actually a "twelve days later" title on the screen when the action resumes) and then the Greeks are gone with only the horse statue remaining.

So basically there's one big battle, one mini-battle, one 1 on 1 battle, and then a massacre when the soldiers slip out of the horse and open the gates in the middle of the night. There's never any real siege at all; no siege engines, no catapults, no battering rams, etc. And it's a good thing for the Trojans, since the walls of fabled Troy are about 25 feet tall, weakly defended, and their gate is secured with fewer locks and bars than your average liquor store.

The physical mechanics of things were probably my biggest peeve about the movie.

Supposedly there are 1000 ships coming from Greece. Of those 1000, we never see more than about 100 at once, and that's on the big pull out shot over the ocean that was in all the early trailers. Once they're on the beach, seemingly every single ship pulls up onto the sand right where they landed. But since they all have at least 50 feet on each side of them, that's about 70 feet per ship, if you figure they're each 20 feet wide. So that's 70 x 1000 = 70,000 feet. That's 13.25 miles of ships! They show maybe 1 or 2 miles of coast, at most, at any time in the movie.

They also never show any form of army organization, no food, no provisions, no water, no blacksmiths to repair armor or weapons, no doctors or wounded, etc. It's very much the child's version of a war, where soldiers just show up and fight, and there's no thought given to feeding them, housing them, caring for the wounded, etc. Basically, the math about how many men there are and where they parked the ships and how they kept them all provisioned, etc, is all about as accurate and exact as Rowling's estimates of how many students attend Hogwarts.  And in both cases, it's best that you just don't think about this sort of thing and let yourself get lost in the fantasy.

I mentioned the brevity of the siege above, but the incompleteness of it was notable as well. As most of you probably know, if not from actual history than from watching LotR:TTT or reading fantasy novels about wars and castles... a siege is generally a lengthy affair. The classic midieval ones were contests of starvation, since armies didn't have the numbers of siege engines to break through a well-defended castle. So they starved them out by surrounding the castle, cutting off the water access, etc. People inside the castle couldn't get any more food in and couldn't make the besiegers leave, so they had to hope for reinforcements or try to outwait their attackers.  Obviously Troy had some amazing resources in the myth, since they supposedly lasted for 10 years, and were still going so strongly that the Greeks had to give up on a direct assault and sneak their way in with the Trojan Horse.

In the movie though, there's no effort made at a siege at all. There's one battle, the start of a second battle, and then the horse trick, just two weeks after they arrived. The Greeks have no siege engines, and not even any ladders, now do they try the most elementary assault techniques, like shooting fire arrows in to try and burn the Trojans out. In fact, they don't even surround the city. All of the action takes place in this huge open plain right in front of the city. A plain that had no reason at all to exist, in front of a city that was built in an entirely illogical location. It was near the sea, but not actually on it. There was no harbor, and not even a road to the beach. Just a long, trackless, dusty plain, in defiance of all city-buildling logic. No city near the water, but with no actual boat access, would ever prosper. What are merchants supposed to do; pull up on the beach and carry their tons of wares uphill over sand to the city?

I think a good movie about a real castle siege, with the time, battles, starvation and desperation, strategy, etc, could be a great film. Troy had neither the intelligence or breadth to dig into such a stimulating topic, and therefore spent its entire running time on the beach, or in the field in front of Troy's main gates. Main gates that had a huge royal viewing box built just to the side of them, effectively turning the field in front of town into a vast coliseum. One in which all of the important action took place, conveniently enough.

There was a great deal of time spent showing and discussing some secret escape tunnel out of Troy, but since the Greeks were never anywhere other than in front of the main gates, it was pretty silly. Anyone who wanted to leave the city could have just walked out the back at any time, and in fact we really had no idea if there were other gates, if the wall went all the way around the city, if the rest of the city was built up on a mountain that couldn't be climbed, etc. There were zero overhead views of Troy, and no sense of the whole area at all. There were obviously other gates, since reinforcements were coming in from the countryside and were arriving after the main gates were closed, but we never saw them, and the Greeks never thought to try attacking them.

We never saw any sign of gardens or food storage in Troy, nor a river flowing into town for water, or anything else. It was much the same for the vast horde of attacking Greeks though. They pulled their ships up on the beach and put up some tents around them, but what were they eating? Where did they get their water? An army of 50,000 requires at least that many more people to feed them, clean up the horse shit, repair their armor and weapons, tend camp, cook food, etc. Yet there wasn't a single servant shown in the entire movie, in the Greek camps. Nor did we see more than about one tent per 200 soldiers. In the myth I'd assume that they had to have taken over the entire country but the main city, and must have brought vast numbers of farmers, tradesman, families, etc, since if they were there for ten years, they weren't exactly living off of a few barrels of olives and wine.  The movie never addressed any of those issues. Not even where they were all taking a dump. Though since they apparently had no food, I guess that wasn't such a problem.

The lack of military tactics didn't end there, since apparently neither side ever sent out a single spy or scout, or bothered to post guards who would stay awake. The Trojans knew nothing about the Greeks leaving until they were gone a day (or more), and the one time the Trojans launched a half-hearted counter attack they were able to roll their exploding balls of hay right up to the beach camps without being sighted or challenged.

Troy wasn't as bad as Episode Two, where the lack of military tactics or even common sense made my head hurt, but I constantly wished Troy had at least made some faint effort to close some of the loopholes and logical shortcomings in its plot. Troy wasn't Helm's Deep; built into a mountain with no back door, and the Greeks weren't Orcs, with no desire but to kill, and no thought of self-preservation. There were there to siege and battle, but as (mostly) free men. Rushing suicidally into arrow fire wasn't in their job description, and it was absurd to have the entire movie take place in just a couple of weeks.

True, it would have been much harder to turn the movie into a real siege, or to throw in more than one battle scene, but hey, it's not like they were working with a tiny budget and limited production time. I didn't get the same feeling of missed opportunity with Troy that I did with say... Underworld. But Troy could have been far, far better, in so many ways.

I've yet to mention the acting in the movie at all, but that's because it was neither good nor bad. Brad Pitt has gotten some shit for being a cheesy Achilles, but I thought he was fine. Nothing amazing, but I believed his character. I didn't believe the loyalty and devotion and worship he got from the other soldiers though, since he did nothing to deserve it. He was the greatest warrior ever to live, so I can see never wanting to fight against him, but why follow him? He'd run into the thickest part of the battle and cut his way out, while everyone who followed him died.  The movie removed all of the gods, other than mentions of them as divine protectors who never did anything noticeable, and also removed every element of Achilles' demi-god status. He wasn't invulnerable everywhere other than his heel in the film, or if he was we never found it out, since he never got hit by anything until the very end, when he was hit in the heel first. It wasn't like he survived wounds that would have killed other men; he was simply so fast and skilled and never got hit at all. He could have been any guy with a sword and a leather skirt, son of a god or goddess or not.

Eric Bana was Hector, the great prince and warrior of Troy, and he was initially unbelievable in his roll, simply because he looked small and dirty in his beard. He worked later when you saw how muscular he was topless and that he could fight, but from the first hour you'd have no idea that he was any sort of a warrior at all.

The woman playing Helen was beautiful, but nothing special. Certainly not "face that launched a 1000 ships" gorgeous, as the story called for her to be. She was golden and glowing, but far from goddess level. They looked at hundreds of women for the part, but they should have kept looking. Or gotten a better make up artist to give whatever woman they did pick a more ethereal, magical glowing look.

Peter O'Toole has gotten some praise for playing the King of Troy and doing a great job. I didn't think he was that special. He wasn't bad, but there wasn't anything amazing about his aged king. Several actors played old men with power in the LotR films, and I thought all of them were as good or better than O'Toole. Of course the acting performance has a lot to do with the script and movie, and since Troy was just mediocre in those areas, O'Toole had more to overcome.

I liked the guy who played Menelaus. He was a dick and power mad, but he also whined and moped pretty believably, while still seeming kingly. The roll didn't give him much to do other than scowl or pout, but I thought the actor did an acceptable job.

Orlando Bloom was okay. His Legolas was a much more interesting character, and I think Orlando will always be best in rolls that allow him to be seen more than heard, but for such a pretty boy he can actually evoke more than one or two emotions, when the script requires it. He was serious and noble in LotR, and earnest and occasionally light in Pirates. Troy required him to be pouty and childish and brave, and he did all of those pretty well, though he had no ability to play sorry/ashamed at all.  Too pretty and smug, I suppose. 

Just for the sake of comparison, it's not like Pitt has any more range. He was the main character in Troy, and never appeared anything but angry or aloof. You'd think it was just the character, until you realize that he's made an entire career out of those two emotions, a gorgeous face, and enough well-placed grins to spice things up. He's basically just a blonde Keanu, with a slightly prettier and less stupid face.

I'm fishing for actor comments, just since no one was godawful, and no one stood out, and the movie was much more about the plot and story, with every bit of dialogue existing solely to advance the plot, rather than being Tarentino-esque and being fun and interesting on its own.

Feedback

A reader far more knowledgeable than I mailed in with some comments on the actual historical (at least as best we know from mythic retellings) information about the siege of Troy. Thanks to Kai for the following.

I'm not going to argue his facts, since I don't know them, and I don't care enough to go back and read the legend and historical books on the subject. So my comments here are just from common sense, rather than any historical knowledge. Also, keep in mind that my comments in the review were mostly about how events were presented in the movie; not how they are told in the legend, or how they may or may not have actually occurred, if any of this actually occurred in the first place.

Recall that the Trojan War was fought well over 2500 years ago, where siege machines were non-existant, written by a blind poet who, by all accounts, never participated in any battles. Ergo, his
stories are mostly for entertainment, and nothing remotely resembling military tactics. However, you brought up certain points that weren't exactly true.

They could build 80-foot ships with multiple decks, a 50-foot tall/long wooden horse that was hollow inside and had a concealed trap door, but they couldn't build a few 30 foot towers and roll them up to the walls?

Firstly, the Greeks did have a whole bunch of ships sail. That number was greatly exaggerated to 1000, since Achilles himself brought somewhere in the vicinity of 40, and Odysseus, another great leader, brought only 3. So it is completely possible for the ships to have landed on a 1 mile strip long beach. And due to the time, there wasn't such a thing as doctors ... Hippocrates wasn't born yet. Blacksmiths - none either. All weapons and armor are either magically forged or plundered.

Well of course it wasn't that many boats in real life, but in the movie they showed 1000ish, so we're going with that, and it was the basis for my comments on how silly the spacing was on the beach. As for the medicine, it just seems like common sense to put all of the men who were too injured to fight in the same place; men must have taken injury in battle and survived after healing constantly back then; it wasn't like they just left everyone with a cut to die in the field.  Also, someone had to make the weapons in the first place, I mean they weren't dropped by aliens or anything.

Which brings up the second point. Troy, one country by itself, could not hope to stand up against the entire Greek juggernaut.  Logically, she had allies as well. The Greeks spent the first 9 years of engagement raiding and sacking the outlying provinces and cities of Troy, hoping to erode the support. Didn't work. So finally they tried to besiege Troy, and due to the supporting hinterlands, Troy managed to stay sufficient. And if one reads the Illiad literally, Troy itself was besieged for less than 3 weeks. So no starvation, desperation, etc. Furthermore, siege equipment was nonexistent at that point. About the best weapon they had versus a fortified city would be fire.

Now this is the sort of interesting stuff I wish the movie had contained, though it's well outside the scope of the movie. Everyone's heard the "10 year siege" story, so when it takes about 2 weeks in the movie the audience is like, "Huh?" Also, who needs siege weaponry, if they've got enough numbers to block every exit from the city and keep food from flowing in? The besiegers can scour the countryside while the people in Troy are eating grain, and then rats.  Even a small castle was basically impregnable for centuries, until gunpowder enabled weapons to be powerful enough to blast holes in stone walls. That's the point in a siege; to starve them out or until they're too weak to keep fighting off basic "over the wall on ladder" siege technology.

About the fortifications, as well. It is said that Poseidon himself laid the walls of Troy. I'd doubt that any mortal engineering would take down such a wall. Which begs the question, why the hell didn't the Trojans just wait in their city and ignore the Greeks? Pride and honor, it seems. In those days, morale was a huge part of the army. If a great warrior was wounded, his entire side would retreat from an otherwise victorious attack. Or if he was defending, his legions would fall back in disarray even if the opposing army wasn't making any headway. Or at least that's what happened in Homer's world.

This is something else that's interesting to know, and would have benefitted the average moviegoer. I saw lots of reviews from people wondering why the entire war stopped to watch Hector kill Achilles' cousin in Achilles' armor, and why they all stopped fighting when they thought Achilles was dead. It really was all about individual combat and heroes and champions back then. After all, if you're some normal foot soldier and you don't want to die, why risk it when you can triumph by rooting on your best fighter against their best?

And thus, the Trojans were forced to meet the Greeks in open battle on a plain (which evolved into 1v1 matches a good portion of the time), and not shoot behind their walls. In fact, there was only a single instance in which the Trojans retreated behind their walls during a battle (when Achilles stopped sulking) and even then, Hector stood before the gate and refused to retreat. And was summarily slaughtered by Achilles.

Kai

I think a very good article could be written comparing Troy the movie to the version of the story in legend to what we know about historical battles of that time. What legend says happened, how much sense that makes in warfare terms, what war was really like back then, etc.  Unfortunately I lack 90% of the knowledge required to write that article, so I'm just speculating on it, for now.

Pre Movie Discussion

May 15, 2004

In lighter news, Troy opened on Friday, and for a change Malaya and I did not see the big new action spectacular opening day. She had to work in the afternoon/evening, I went jogging, and we wanted to lie around and eat Texas fries and chicken strips and watch trash TV after dark, rather than braving the Friday night movie crowds. I'm pretty indifferent about Troy, but Malaya wants to see it, so I imagine we'll go check it out tomorrow afternoon. I'm taking a snack and a soda though, this ain't no Return of the King, and 2.5 hours can be an eternity when the movie isn't that great.

As for the reviews, it's up to 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn't great, but isn't horrible either. Van Helsing only managed 25%, so in theory Troy is more than twice as good as Van Helsing. And 19.33 times better than Godsend, if you want to apply the metric to the logical conclusion.

RT requires 60% positive reviews for a Fresh score, and Troy was in the 50% range all week, but has slowly crept up towards a non-splat on Thursday and Friday, as more reviews came in. The main critical comment is that it's pretty and massive and long; chock full of characters and battles, but that none of the characters really stand out or gain any emotional resonance, and the battles are too CGI and not-stirring.  So basically it's what LotR would have been with a less-skilled director and a less interesting script. And I'd imagine it's financial success will reflect that.

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