Reel To Reel:
Troy
How It Rates: **1/2Starring: Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom
Rated: R
Red Flags: Ye Olde Graphic War Violence, Brief Sexuality
Preconceived Notions: With a massive, bloated budget, pride cometh before the fall of Troy.
The Bottom Line: It's no Greek tragedy, but it's not a triumph either.
Somewhere in the making of Troy, some Warner Brothers executive had to have looked at the $175 million budget and said, "We're spending how much on this picture? A war over a woman?" And that's the question people still ask when they hear the story of the Trojan War, the triumph of testosterone above everything else.
It all starts when things are looking good. A war-weary Greece has called a truce with Troy. It looks like everybody's going to put down their swords and shields for awhile. That's until Prince Paris of Troy (Bloom) runs off with King Menaleus' wife, Helen. Not a good diplomatic move. Menelaus wants his woman back, and he wants revenge. With the help of his brother, King Agamemnon of the Mycenaeans, he enlists the help of armies across Greece. Agamemnon enlists the help of legendary warrior Achillies (Pitt), a wildcard who fights for nobody but himself and hates Menelaus. Hector (Bana) is the best the Trojans have, and down the line we know these two are gonna tango.
Troy is not history any more than its source material, Homer's Illiad is. It's still an epic, though, in size, in budget, in visuals. This is the kind of film Hollywood used to make before CGI, and people were blown away by it. This is also the kind of film that lends itself nicely to riffing in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000, with corny elevated dialogue, especially Achilles screaming "Hector!" outside the walls of Troy. Part of me wanted to shout back, "Oh Hector!" like the crowd did to Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon.
Troy's major accomplishment, besides blood-and-guts warfare, is showing how the two toughest kids on the block will go to the wall and kill everybody in the name of honor and their own inflated egos. And yet these same men have some respect for civilized warfare, as a sequence late in the movie shows. They also have a desire to settle things man-to-man instead of army-to-army. But we know all's fair in love and war. For an epic, this sounds all too human.
The film runs long at more than two-and-a-half hours. But it doesn't feel long. Some cuts could have been made, but I'm not sure you would have a better picture for them. Troy wants to be an action movie and a love story at the same time. But it seems like we're only getting half of both.
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