MOVIE CHAT: TROY

**rocketmaster** · May 28th, 2004, 12:45 PM

Saw TROY over the weekend. Where to start...still trying to figure out if they were actually trying to be funny with the overblown 50's camp. It was an odd movie. 1950's soap opera romance for the ladies; 1950's blood and guts war movie for the gents. Not sure it appealed to either. I was certainly disappointed, as I was looking forward to this film for the past year. It wasn't all bad, but all in all, not a good movie.

The opening shots of over exposed desert landscape and cheap-looking text overlays made it abundantly clear that this was to be a Ben Hur/Spartacus style homage...it had me squirming in my seat in the first five minutes and wishing I had bought tickets for Van Helsing instead.

If I ever had any respect for director Wolfgang Peterson, I've lost it. That's not to say I wouldn't take his money if he wanted to give me a job, but sheesh, his sensibilities are so out to lunch. You HAVE to look for the golden goddess statue in the background of one scene that looks just like, I swear to god, Betty Boop with urban black girl hair extensions. I howled with laughter. I'm compelled to rent the DVD just to hear him explain these absurdities.

The actors did a good job with what they had to work with though, despite Peterson. I can just picture him yelling into a bullhorn, "Brad, can you try to look just a smidge more intrepid for me?" Good grief...Pitt on the ship, looking out to sea. Bwahahaha!!! Other than that though, Pitt played a somewhat uncomfortable role he's never played before and did it well.

Most of the girls were window dressing, but I like that girl with the lips from Wing Commander - Saffron Burrows. And I have to say, that by the third friggin' hour, Eric Bana had begun to win me over too. You guys know how much I despised The Hulk, I had this thing about Bana, that his eyes were devoid of emotion. I'm starting to think that maybe I was slightly too harsh about that. His eye color is so dark brown that they're almost black on camera, and pupil dilation says a lot about emotion. I'm not 100% repealing that, mind you, because people wear all black lenses and act with their brows and facial muscles, etc., but I am forgiving him a tiny little bit because he pulled off a better performance in this movie than he did in The Hulk.

Orlando Bloom was A+ fantastic, what a career this kid has in front of him. I am so impressed with him. It was neat to see LOTR's Sean Bean and Orlando in such close proximately so soon, but they shared no scenes together at all. And despite what everyone seems to be saying, Peter O'Toole, whom I admire, was not incredible...he had one strong scene but several embarrassing ones. (It was nice to recognize 'King Arthur' in a small role too!)

This movie was like a weird dramatization you'd see in high school ancient history class...I'm disappointed that the History/Learning Channels are not running the usual concurrent documentaries 'cause I'd love to see bits on the actual Homer source material.

About the music...I now officially despise James Horner. What a frigging talentless HACK! The closing theme song made me want to PUKE MY GUTS OUT!!! The vocalist had ZERO creativity or style, the song was like a computerized rewrite of the Titanic song. It was the worst thing I have ever heard in my entire life. An original composed by any 6th grade class at random anywhere in this country could have done better. His career is OVER, and this proves it. Hmmm, maybe that is the destiny for both director and composer...school documentaries...

**Tard** · May 28th, 2004, 06:45 PM

I heard funny things about a little Bippity-Bop dance-step Brad does before killing (that he does about a dozen times thru the movie). Sounded like something offa "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" tossed into the Gweek Empiah timeframe.

kingfozzy · May 30th, 2004, 05:56 AM

Think i'll wait til it hits DVD. [img]biggrin.gif[/img]

**rocketmaster** · May 31st, 2004, 07:17 AM

If any man alive claims to be anything but jealous about the way Brad Pitt moves in this movie, he's lying.

Not joking. If this film is remembered for anything, it will be remembered as one of Brad Pitt's ultimate personal, physical accomplishments.

**rocketmaster** · May 31st, 2004, 09:52 AM

I nabbed this fan review from IMDB because this woman is adorably clever...well...it made me laugh.

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User Comments:

noralee
Queens, NY

Date: 17 May 2004
Summary: 2 Minutes of Eye Candy Brightens A Long, Stiff Epic
My viewing of "Troy" was helped by my son's exegesis, courtesy of two years of Ivy League reading of Dead White Men's civilization. He pointed out the legend of Troy isn't just based on Homer but also Virgil's "The Aeneid," among other sources for the Trojan Horse legend, and he approved of Aeneas's sudden appearance in the last few minutes of the film. As I haven't yet started my summer reading of Homer and Virgil, I'll depend on his comments.

Paris's wimpiness was Homeric, especially in his use of the bow & arrow, as Homer strongly feels that archers are cowards and Real Men use spears and swords. Gee, and I thought it was Orlando Bloom being "Legolas" again from "Lord of the Rings." All the best scenes - such as Hector saying farewell to his wife, the consequences of Achilles' cousin in battle, Priam begging for Hector's body (with Peter O'Toole wiping Brad Pitt off the screen with his acting)-- were straight outta Homer.

The guy in front of me complained that a review he'd read "had given away too much of the plot." Gee, 3,000 years of literary analysis seems to have passed this guy by. But, then, as the arrow hits Achilles, there were a good portion of people who gasped and said "Oh! His 'Achilles heel'!" I couldn't help laughing when Achilles bellowed for Hector as if that's where the word "hectoring" must come from.

Leaving out the quarreling gods' manipulations of humans leaves out a good part of the legend, but my husband thought a modern audience wouldn't buy magical excuses. People got killed off who didn't die in Homer just because the leaden screenplay had turned them into figures that the audience would want dead. Of course that would leave several Greek playwrights high and dry as they dealt a lot with the aftermath of Trojan War soldiers.

I got a kick out of Helen and Paris's adultery being treated like the Tonkin Gulf incident as just an excuse for the king's imperialistic intentions. The effort to get us to sympathize with a young woman trapped in an arranged marriage to an older lout was weakened by the model's non-acting (yeah there's been a lot of jokes in reviews about how many ships this face deserved), but she managed to be quite heroic in her nude embrace against Paris's metal armor.

Pitt's spoiled surfer dude is actually very close to Homer's portrait of Achilles, according to my son, and Homer did report on his constant squabbling with the king about a woman captive. As for me, I had no doubt that she wasn't going to resist Achilles when her first sighting of him is naked and covered in sweat and the blood of her fellow Trojans. I was wondering more if Brad's glistening, very impressive body could possibly really be all personal training and had any prosthetics as I don't recall any interviews with him during shooting that had him THAT muscle-bound.

I did think the best parts of the movie were the 2 minutes altogether here and there of beefcake (including Eric Bana, who also movingly portrays Hector as a devoted family man, and a quickie shot of Bloom, though mores the pity none such of Sean Bean as Odysseus) that can wait to be seen until folks post screen shots on the Internet from the DVD, with the sound off so as not hear Pitt's wandering accent and ineffectual declamations. The major difference between this very long movie (after all the Trojan War did last some 10 years) and '50's sword-and-sandals epics is now the camera can go quite seductively a few inches lower on the hunks.

The leaden directing tried to use the bombastic music to make the action move while the dialogue was just sillily stiff. I stayed through all the credits and wasn't surprised that I didn't recognize any of the special effects shops as the cheesy boats and soldiers looked like the old "Jason and the Argonauts" movies, resonating like Pitt's voice-over in the cartoon "Sinbad" last year.

Along with the hand to hand combat, one of the few imitations of "Gladiator" that almost works, Tanja Tzarovska and the Bulgarian Women's Choir do a fair imitation of Lisa Gerrard's Oscar-winning soundtrack contributions.

As to Homer's stirring tale of war, politics, family, and loyalty that has echoed through millennia, the only lesson that all the women and at least 10% of the men will take away is that Achilles was eminently beddable. So if this film gets more people to use condoms, it will have been a success.

kingfozzy · May 31st, 2004, 10:00 AM

Hey!! She slammed those old Harryhausen films! Those were classics! Well, except for Clash Of The Titans, that was just plain bad. [img]smile.gif[/img]

**Tard** · June 1st, 2004, 02:19 AM

Hey!! 'Clash Of The Titans' may have come-out later, but still had the camp & stop-motion goofiness made endearing with Harryhausen's early Sinbad flix. It was an entertaining retro experience. [img]tongue.gif[/img]