AMC had this dud on last night-it was hard to watch (10 minutes of commercials for every 5 minutes of film). So, I didn’t get to the good parts-was this movie a success? Was Pitt OK as Acilles? Anyway, since the story is mostly myth-who knew how to kill Achilles? Must be hard to hit someone in the heel.
Paris’ arrow was guided by Apollo.
I think Pitt did a reasonably good job as Achilles, certainly better than I was expecting. But I was much more impressed by Eric Bana as Hector.
The movie is not so much the story of the Iliad myth as a speculation on the sort of real-life events that might have given rise to the myth. The gods play no part. Achilles’ reputation for invulnerability is based on the fact that, when Patroclus comes out and fights dressed in Achilles’ armor, everybody mistakes him for Achilles. So after Patroclus gets whacked, Achilles’ appearance appears to be a resurrection. Helen is more a pretext for the war than the cause of it. Stuff like that.
I didn’t like the movie much because 1) Achilles is set up to be a sympathetic character, but he’s not, and the whole part between him and Briseis falls flat, 2) Agamemnon is too incompetent to be a successful king, and 3) because Achilles isn’t sympathetic, there’s no reason to root for anyone but the Trojans; the Greeks don’t have any points in their favor at all.
Sympathetic or not, he spends nearly all of the Iliad sulking in his tent because Agamemnon took a girl he fancied. Then he got angry and killed Hector, dragged him around Troy, and that was it. Great read, nonetheless.
Everyone realizes it had been Patroclus right after he eats it. Hector calls an end to the day’s battle, and later when he and Achilles fight, he talks about discovering that he had killed the wrong person immediately. That all happened in the Iliad. Achilles had been rumored to be invulnerable by the start of the movie, as the kid who is sent to retrieve him asks him about it.
Short review: The acting was good to quite good, but the story didn’t gel. It’s fine to pop in to watch, but ultimately pretty forgettable.
It’s not historically or even mythically accurate, but it’s good for an excuse to eat some popcorn.
As I remember the movie, Achilles pulls out all of the arrows except for the one in his foot. I think they were suggesting this as the source of the myth. (Perhaps someone came across his body and concluded that the arrow in his heel was the fatal wound.)
Yea, parts of it were good, but it was really uneven, so sadly the whole was rather meh. For example, Peter O’Toole spends most of the film half asleep, but does perk up enough for his big scene, begging Achilles for his sons body.
Also, if you’re a straight woman or gay man, I would imagine this must be the greatest film ever made for you.
Eric Bana always impresses me, the whelp is very pretty, and I was pleasantly surprised by Brad Pitt.
Good, nothing to write home about, but a nice enough way to spend an evening.
I definitely agree with these points.
No, that was 300.
I didn’t hate it. This pretty much covers my feelings about it. I did like watching Brad Pitt brood, but I can’t stand Achilles in general. Sulky bugger.
While enjoyable, Troy just didn’t have that endlessly rewatchable awesomeness factor that Braveheart or Gladiator have for me.
I didn’t realize Achilles did so much sulking and brooding.
I did find Sean Bean enjoyable as Odysseus
Bingo.
I take a perverse pleasure in it (I own a copy), because, like Excalibur, it presents the story as a lot of people imagine it, even though everyone knows it’s not at all historically accurate, or even remorely mythologically accurate.
As I’ve said on this Board before, I can live with them cutting the Gods out, but I’m annoyed by their changing things for the sheer freakin’ joy of it. It starts out right at the beginnibg with Sparta being a coastal city. What? Look at a map of Greece sometime – Sparta’s smack in the middle of the Peloponnese.
Okay, so I’ll let you have that one in the name of expediency. Gets the story moving faster. But then you get people being killed who shouldn’t, and changes that make no difference in the story. Achilles being killed by a shot in the ankle isn’t in the Iliad (Achilles is still alive at the end of the Iliad, which doesn’t cover the entire Trojan War – see Quintus Smyrnaeus for full details), and I’m pretty sure it’s not even mentioned there. But they put it in the film anyway (although just as one of many hits, not the fatal one)Achilles died before Troy fell, though.
I’m reasonably certain that the Greeks didn’t live in yurts.
But Peter O’Toole’s performance is GREAT.
So a pretty mixed bag. Don’t use it as your source for Grekk history or mythology – my copy of the Classics Illustrated version is a LOT more accurate. But it’s fun to watch, and you can amuse yourself by pointing out and totting up the glaring errors and changes.
I enjoyed it.
If nothing else, there are some great visual images. I haven’t seen it in a while, and I can still pretty vividly recall, for example, the armies standing at the beginning and Achille’s all-in-a-days-work slaying, the armada movign toward Troy, the fireball attack.
I loved the part when Achilles men form that dark shell when they first hit the shores.
The horse is pretty cool.
Notions of historical or mythological accuracy didn’t enter my mind the entire time. However, I didn’t feel as much human emotion as I did in Gladiator, so it still falls a bit short of that. But, still, Troy is a pleasure.
The main thing I remember about this movie is writing it up for my college paper. I began with “The Trojan War: what is it good for?”
I should have followed it up with “Absolutely nothing,” even though that isn’t really true. Pitt and Bana were both good, but like Sage Rat said, the movie doesn’t hold together. In part that’s because Orlando Bloom was supposed to be the romantic lead, and he was comically overmatched. When I saw the thing, people were laughing at him whenever he spoke.
Because Paris is essentially a little spoiled bitch in Troy.
And then along came 300.
My 16 year old daughter thinks it the scenes with Bana and Pitt move like a well-oiled machine. Well, she mentioned something about those two and oil …
Every so often that flick comes home from the library and I find I can just plop down and enjoy any 30-45 minutes of it and then get uo and leave without feeling I missed anything. Don’t think I ever sat through the whole thing, but am pretty sure I’ve seen most of it.
My favorite part was trying to keep track of how many guys Achilles personally killed on the initial landing/storming of the temple. I forget the exact number, but at times it is a little tough to even clal out the numbers that quickly!
So how’s that for a favorable film review?!