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Troy (2004)

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From Time Out Film Guide

As preposterous excuses for calamitous military assaults go, the tangled pretext for the Trojan War might rival those fictitious WMDs. To the consternation of his upstanding brother Hector (Bana), timid trousersnake Paris (Bloom), an androgynous pin-up, smuggles away his sweetheart Helen (Kruger) from her gilded cage in the palace of her much older husband, the Spartan king Menelaos (Gleeson). When the spluttering cuckold swears revenge, his brother, ruthless land-grabber King Agamemnon (Cox, taking fork and well-sharpened knife to a prime-beef role), seizes the opportunity to lay siege to Troy, the last barrier to complete control of the Aegean. To vanquish his enemy, however, Agamemnon requires the fighting prowess of the unreliable and apparently unkillable Achilles (Pitt), a surly surfer type who, in his apolitical stance and stoical longing for death, somewhat recalls Maximus in Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Petersen's own sword and sandals bonanza proceeds by a numbingly reliable tick-tock of expository set pieces alternating with vast CGI-aided battle scenes. Originally set to shoot partly in Morocco, the production moved to the Baja peninsula of Mexico when the Iraq war loomed. Under this shadow, Petersen sensibly veers away from morbid intimacy with war's ravages on the flesh, and instead strains for a Breughelian horror in the D-Day-like assault on the beach and the inferno-lit sack of Troy. In grandiosely illustrating the power-drunk derangement of empire building, and in rendering war as a pointless, brutish, dishonourable wank (not to mention a big sandy bore), Troy is certainly of its horrified moment. JWin.

Author: JWin

Time Out Film Guide

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User reviews of this film

Andy S said...

Posted on Jan 22 2009 14:40 Great sword and sandles epic....by no means as good as Gladiator and many will slam the difference between movie and legend, but it is very entertaining. Pitt is actually suprisingly good as Achilles but the real star is Eric Bana as the tough Hector, and his sword fight with Pitt an action movie highlight. Brian Cox is very good as a real evil SOB, and Peter O'Toole's key scene with Pitt beautifully acted. Check out the new director's cut on dvd too, for more violence and flesh!! Great stuff.

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