Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy Turns Homer’s Ambiguity Into a Straightforward Hero’s March

Troy runs 163 minutes. It has a 50,000-man army, a thousand ships, and one very old story. Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 epic uses all of them, and still cannot decide what it is about.

The film compresses Homer’s Iliad — a decade of war — into, as its own account puts it, little more than a couple of weeks. The result moves fast, looks expensive, and keeps losing the thread.

Trailer, via YouTube Movies.

Brad Pitt’s Achilles and the Promise of Eternal Glory

The film opens in 1184 BC, with Agamemnon (Brian Cox) uniting the Greek kingdoms. Achilles (Brad Pitt) fights for him but is sickened by his brutal leadership. That tension is the best thing Troy has going.

When Achilles consults his mother, Thetis, she tells him that staying in Larissa means a peaceful life, while sailing to Troy brings death and eternal glory. He picks glory. Pitt plays that choice with a stillness the rest of the movie rarely earns.

Then Paris (Orlando Bloom) smuggles Helen (Diane Kruger) out of Sparta, and the plot becomes a machine. Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) asks his brother Agamemnon to help take her back. Agamemnon agrees because conquering Troy would give him control of the Aegean Sea. Odysseus (Sean Bean) is sent to talk Achilles into joining. Every step is legible, and none of it is surprising.

Hector, Briseis, and a Duel That Breaks Its Own Rules

Eric Bana’s Hector is the film’s most complete character. He is a prince, a commander, and a brother who has to clean up Paris’s mess. In Troy, King Priam (Peter O’Toole) welcomes Helen and decides to prepare for war. The Greeks take the Trojan beach, largely through Achilles and his Myrmidons. Achilles sacks the temple of Apollo and claims Briseis (Rose Byrne), a priestess and cousin of Paris and Hector, as a prisoner. When Agamemnon spitefully takes her from him, Achilles refuses to aid the siege.

The parley outside Troy is where the film’s logic breaks. Paris offers to duel Menelaus personally in exchange for Helen and the city being spared. Agamemnon accepts, intending to take the city regardless. Menelaus wounds Paris and nearly kills him, but Hector kills Menelaus, violating the pact. Hector then kills Ajax the Great. It is a strong sequence built on a cheap trick: the rules exist only until the movie needs them gone.

Three things Troy gets right, in order of how much they matter:

1. Bana’s Hector, whose death gives the back half its weight.
2. The Myrmidons taking the beach, the one battle with a clear point of view.
3. Pitt’s physical presence, which carries scenes the script cannot.

What the Iliad Gets That Troy Does Not

Troy is loosely based on the Iliad, and the word is doing real work. The poem covers a quarrel in the ninth year of the war; the film covers the whole war in a couple of weeks. The sack of Troy is not from the Iliad at all. It comes from the Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. That is a legitimate choice, and it is also why the film feels like a highlight reel with no through-line.

The cast is deep. Sean Bean, Brendan Gleeson, Rose Byrne, Saffron Burrows as Andromache, Garrett Hedlund as Patroclus, Vincent Regan as Eudorus. Peter O’Toole as Priam is the one performance that suggests the tragedy the film keeps gesturing at.

Troy premiered at Cannes on May 13, 2004, and Warner Bros. released it the next day. It made over $497 million worldwide, the eighth highest-grossing film of 2004 and Petersen’s highest-grossing film. It was nominated for Best Costume Design at the 77th Academy Awards. None of that is an argument for the movie. It is an argument for the marketing.

The reviews were mixed. Critics praised the entertainment value and the performances of Pitt and Bana, and criticized a story deemed unfaithful to the Iliad. That split is the honest read, and it is also a little lazy. The problem is not that Troy departs from Homer. The problem is that it departs from Homer and arrives nowhere in particular. A director’s cut exists, and it does not fix the spine of the thing.

What matters here is the gap between the film’s scale and its stakes. Agamemnon wants the Aegean. Achilles wants to be remembered. Paris wants Helen. Hector wants his city to survive. Those are four different movies, and Troy never decides which one it is. The tagline promises passion, honor, destiny, victory, love. The film delivers the ships.

Bana and Pitt are worth the runtime. The rest is a 163-minute trailer for a better film. 5.6 of 10.

Brad Pitt · epic film · Iliad · movie review · Troy · Wolfgang Petersen