James, the "Starfish Mon", on the beach in Negril, Jamaica, with his boat.

In Negril, Jamaica, there's an elderly man named James who for years has been selling starfish and shells out of his rickety homemade boat. James professes to have met John F. Kennedy in the very early 1960's, lives off the land, but knows what the Internet is and that there are photos of him on it. He also offers rides in his boat, which no sane person looking at the boat would accept. James' handmade craft is about the only boat that could possibly be launched by Diane Kruger as "The Face That Launched A Thousand Ships" in Wolfgang Petersen's attempted epic, TROY. (Everyone has to have an angle on this particular concept; do I get the award for reaching the farthest?)

TROY, which is "inspired" by the Iliad in much the same way that Van Helsing is "inspired" by the Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein novels and the Wolfman films, is the kind of "Classic Comics" version of ancient Greek literature designed to trip up kids on the test. This may be Homer's Iliad, but the Homer is Simpson.

Oh, the basics are still all there; callow and lusty Paris (Orlando Bloom), exotic Helen of Troy (Diane Kruger), the empire-building Agamemnon (Brian Cox, gleefully chewing the scenery), the noble warrior Odysseus (a smirkalicious Sean Bean, who gets some redemption here for the thanklessness of playing Boromir), honor-bound Hector (the stolid Eric Bana), kindly Old King Priam (Peter O'Toole), and of course, the great warrior Achilles (Brad Pitt. Brad PITT? You gotta be shitting me! Yes, Brad Pitt). But TROY bears about as much resemblance to the Iliad as a #2 combo at McDonalds bears to an actual meal...and it's geared towards the same audience.

This sort of sword and sandals film, a genre that had mercifully been put in mothballs until the producers of Gladiator put something in the kool-aid to make people to believe it was actually viable, has historically been ridiculously silly. Rather than being researched from the history we know, sandal operas tend to re-create Movie Greece, in which everyone looks like a movie star (except the faceless warriors, who tend to resemble Orcs), the dentistry is so good that everyone has perfect, white-capped teeth, all hair is impeccably shampooed and styled, and in this case, the royal family of Troy wears the kind of tie-dyed robes not seen in this ubiquity since Jerry Garcia died. And of course, everyone speaks English, with varying degrees of British accents or attempts at same. Who knew, after all, that Odysseus hailed from Yorkshire?

Inevitably, the scripts for such films tend to be packed with ponderous, pseudo-classic dialogue to show that it's Serious Stuff, and David Benioff's script for TROY, alas, falls into this category. With a less proficient cast, the audience would need its own shields to protect itself from the rocks and debris of the dialogue as they fall off the screen*. But because, in a collective moment of madness, some of the best actors out of the U.K., decided to do this film, it's nowhere near as preposterous as it could have been.

In an effort to keep the run time to a mere two hours and forty-two minutes, the story is compressed so that it appears to take place in 39 days; a kind of Survivor: Sparta, rather than the ten years of actual time in which it is set. And some inexplicable plot changes are bound to make those who have read Edith Hamilton more recently than my 35 years ago scratch their heads in befuddlement.

As befitting a story about the battle of Troy, this one puts a great deal of its CGI budget into the battle scenes. Wolfgang Petersen would seem to be a good choice to direct such scenes, were it not for the 800-pound gorilla called The Lord of the Rings that hovers over every minute of this film's battle scenes. Indeed, the ghost of Peter Jackson pervades this film, with bits such as warriors beating their spears on the ground stolen right from the Maori extras Jackson used as Orcs. In any other time, the battle scenes in this film would be terrific, but with Jackson having raised the bar, they seem frustratingly mundane. Where Jackson portrays war as a series of one-on-one combats, Petersen returns battle to the kind of quick cuts that save money, but leave the audience dizzy. There are tantalizing elements stolen from the Battle of Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King, the storming of the beach at Normandy from Saving Private Ryan, and the fight scenes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon here, and yet without the innovative qualities of those elements, the battle scenes seem simply derivative. And for some inexplicable reason, the one terrific "epic" shot, in which the camera swoops down over the two armies converging, is abruptly cut short -- as if cutting the remaining five seconds would adversely impact the film's running time.

TROY's one strength is the cast, and for the most part, the cast saves this film from being the kind of big-budget disaster it could have been. Obviously the Big Draw here is Brad Pitt, pumped up as if on steroids, in full Golden God regalia. Pitt has always been at his most interesting when he's allowed to ugly himself up, and here he tries mightily to turn Achilles into an introspective, brooding, reluctant warrior; the Colin Powell of Agamemnon's army. Because it's Brad Pitt up there, of course, all of the homoerotic text, let alone subtext, is washed away; indeed, this is the straightest bunch of Greeks since Tom Conti seduced Pauline Collins in Shirley Valentine. Pitt's Achilles introduces Patroclus to Odysseus as "my cousin", as if he were David Fisher introducing his partner Keith to Mom in the second season of Six Feet Under. He's not fooling anyone, no matter how many luciously lounging naked babes they photograph him in bed with.

The problem is that Achilles is really the Viggo Mortensen role, but between the Very Big Themes this film tries to convey, combined with Orlando Bloom only remembering three-quarters of the way through the picture that he's Legolas and is therefore a really crackerjack archer; Boromir (Sean Bean) being reincarnated as Odysseus, and Brian Cox as Agamemnon being so megalomaniacal it can only be attributed to the Ring, there are only so many reminders to Jackson's far superior films that the audience can handle. Pitt tries mightily to turn Achilles into Jude Fawley, or Heathcliff, or some other brooding Brit, but the role is written for beefcake, and for all that he's obviously in great shape for this film (which tries to show him naked as much as possible and still keep an R rating), this role doesn't pack even a tenth of the sexual frisson he made such a splash with in Thelma and Louise over ten years ago.

And while we're on the subject of people who don't pack the sexual frisson they used to, TROY also boasts two of the great sex symbols of the 1960's in Julie Christie as Achilles' mother Thetis and Peter O'Toole as kindly old King Priam. There's something just a bit sad about seeing these two former Great Beauties in their dotage, but while they may have lost their golden good looks, they have something that Brad Pitt can't hold a candle to, and that's the ability to make you believe in their characters. Julie Christie isn't on screen for long, but she makes a lasting impression when she does. O'Toole, who is really at his best when he has the snarkiest lines, manages to make his doddering old king far less ridiculous than he should be in a film like this. The best scene in the film involves O'Toole's Priam visiting Achilles and kissing "the hands that killed my son." When he explains to Achilles, "I loved my boy from the moment he opened his eyes to the moment you closed them", and Achilles acknowledges him with "You are a far better king than the one who defeated you", it's a young actor who knows his limitations in his craft acknowledging the superiority of an older one he can't even hope to emulate. O'Toole may, like Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir Alec Guinness before him, be spending the twilight of his career doing character roles in crap films, but he makes his characters just as memorable.

As Priam's sons, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom actually could pass for brothers. And once again, the Beauteous Orlando is blown off the screen by a far superior performance in the person of Eric Bana's Hector. Bana tends to play his characters so close to the vest and so quietly that we can hardly see them -- a contrast to the charming, funny persona he projects in interviews -- but here he anchors the film. His Hector may be just a very decent, good man with a strong sense of duty, but Bana makes that look so appealing that in his big climactic battle with Achilles, you're rooting for the less-flashy warrior who also happens to have a soul. The hapless Orlando Bloom, batting his eyelashes and trying to convey grand passion for Helen, just isn't credible as the cocksman who has bedded half of the Mediterranean.

As Helen, Diane Kruger is pretty enough in a sharp-featured, vaguely skanky Victoria's Secret model kind of way, but next to her callow lover, she looks like she might as well be Mrs. Robinson to Bloom's Benjamin. Bloom is one of those ridiculously beautiful young men who could make any female next him look like the bottom side of a shoe, and this romance needs to either be played to set him off against a worldlier woman, in which case just cast Catherine Zeta-Jones and be done with it already, or else needs a fresh young face with less knowingness to it, someone who doesn't look barely one step removed from a pole dancer. Kruger looks like she could eat Orlando Bloom for breakfast, and still have room to roast Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) on a spit.

Of course any telling of the Iliad has to deal with The Horse. It's baffling in this film that you never see a tree, and yet there is wood all over the place. Elaborate funeral pyres are built to cremate the war dead, and the Trojan Horse is constructed of wood. Yet just as Chuck Jones has ruined Wagner's Ring cycle for all eternity, so has Monty Python now ruined the dramatic effect of the second Big Movie of the year, for I defy anyone to look at this Trojan Horse without thinking of that giant rabbit. Or worse, you may, as I did, hallucinate Peter Jackson riding into Troy on the horse shouting "My elephants are much cooler than this old reject from "This Old House!"

And damn it, he's right.

-- Jill Cozzi

Read Martin and Gabriel's Critics Over Coffee conversation about Troy.

*cf. fellow Cinemarati Scott Renshaw (5/3/2002) in referring to Unfaithful at the Cinemarati Roundtable.

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