PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 5/14/04)

Everything in Troy is big, grander even than legend or history: huge movie star, sweeping love affair, and a budget that makes studio heads double-fist Paxil. And it takes an awfully big ego, as well, to conceive of improving on Homer’s story. Yet Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy recalls an age when Hollywood not only gambled on but flourished with grandiose epics and casts of thousands, and brings megawatt star power to what is, at root, a brilliantly told story.

Brad Pitt leads a marvelous cast as the proud, petulant warrior Achilles. Arrogance and selfishness sit well on Pitt, who just might be too beautiful for words, but it takes an encounter with a true immortal to give his performance the gravitas it needs. Peter O’Toole, as Troy’s King Priam, deserves an Oscar nomination for the elegance with which he handles his character’s humiliation in a key scene with Pitt. With dignity and subtlety ramming up against the younger man’s golden conceit, O’Toole elevates them both to something quietly heartbreaking.

Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom, as princes Hector and Paris of Troy, are a study in contradictions. Hector could easily have been stolid, stoic, and utterly boring, but Bana’s muscular performance creates a finely shaded, conflicted man, at once tender and intensely masculine. Bloom, by contrast, diverges from his supremely capable Legolas in the Lord of the Rings trilogy to stretch his legs as a venal coward ruled by his hormones. His love scenes with Diane Kruger, playing Helen, are so passionless she might as well be inflatable, but he pulls off a difficult, decidedly non-heroic scene with impressively egoless commitment.

Among the supporting cast, Saffron Burrows, as Hector’s wife, fares best, even in grief and terror managing to outshine Kruger’s wooden blankness. Sean Bean and Brian Cox play the thankless roles of crafty Odysseus and the deliciously evil Agamemnon, respectively, with Bean shoring up some of Pitt’s surfer-dude tendencies and Cox gnawing gamely at whatever scenery he can reach. Oddly, each actor seems to use his own accent, leading to a strange mishmash of Scottish-German-English-Aussie-American-inflected Greeks.

Gladiator notwithstanding, Hollywood has all but forgotten how to make The Big Epic, and it requires some practice to catch the rhythm again. But once Troy catches its stride, clunky proclamations (such as Pitt’s "Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!" line from the trailer) give way to terse dialogue and much more convincing line readings from one and (almost) all, and Petersen handles scenes of devastating intimacy as ably as the enormous clashes of armies.

—Sara Brady

Original Soundtrack CD

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