Greek pageantry
Women. We’re trouble, aren’t we?
We make men do crazy things for love, like woo us away from our husbands and start wars that destroy entire nations.
But we’re worth it … right?
Well, maybe we are if we look like Helen, she of the ship-launching face, played with delicate, beguiling beauty by Diane Kruger in the blockbuster “Troy.”
Brad Pitt, the film’s star, has always had a face that could set an armada or two in motion, but he’s added to that a buffed body through a well-documented regimen of diet, exercise and (gasp!) quitting smoking.
As Achilles — the greatest warrior, like, ever — Pitt leads a tremendous supporting cast (many of whom also have the chiseled look of Greek gods) through a giant, CliffsNotes version of “The Iliad.”
To recap even more concisely: Paris, the puppy-dog-eyed prince of Troy (Orlando Bloom), has fallen for Helen, queen of Sparta and wife of King Menelaus (the always excellent Brendan Gleeson), who’s twice her age. After feasting with Menelaus one night, Paris runs home with Helen to the walled city of Troy the next morning.
This prompts Menelaus to run to his brother, King Agamemnon (a fabulously ferocious Brian Cox), who amasses his tribes in an all-out war on Troy — not just to retrieve Helen or restore Menelaus’ honor, but because Agamemnon is power-hungry, and this is a good excuse to seize the elusive Troy, where King Priam (Peter O’Toole) rules, and take over the entire Aegean.
Achilles, who apparently fights solely for fame, is Agamemnon’s reluctant secret weapon. And did we mention that he’s naked within the first few minutes of the opening credits?
The film from Wolfgang Petersen (“The Perfect Storm”) is enormous and awe-inspiring; visually, it’s everything you’d want from this kind of epic. And what’s remarkable is that, unlike other CGI-laden monstrosities in which the elaborate battles and landscapes are obviously fake, this looks seamlessly realistic.
You truly feel as if you’re watching tens of thousands of Spartan and Trojan soldiers charging toward each other, heaving and hurling themselves furiously until they collapse in a bloody heap.
Even the more intimate moments have a visual authenticity. An early banquet scene in which King Menelaus hosts Paris and Prince Hector of Troy (Eric Bana), King Priam’s elder son, as a show of peace, has a faded grandeur about it; the lighting and colors recall the sort of huge historical pictures that came out 40 or 50 years ago.
“Troy” is too long, though, and it lacks narrative momentum. It lurches from one battle to the next with some unconvincing romance in between that feels tacked on, particularly between Achilles and Briseis (Rose Byrne), Hector’s and Paris’ cousin who’s taken prisoner during an attack on the Temple of Apollo.
The script veers from hokey dialogue, which may be an allusion to the sword-and-sandal movies that came before “Troy,” to jarringly anachronistic colloquialisms, such as Helen’s plea to Paris, “Don’t play with me.”
Among the other liberties Benioff has taken: The gods, who inserted themselves in the action of “The Iliad,” are merely referred to either with reverence or cynicism. And yet a quiet moment in which Priam visits Achilles and begs for the body of his slain son, Hector — whom Achilles defeated in a mano-a-mano showdown before dragging his corpse behind a chariot — is more powerful than the film’s huge battle sequences.
O’Toole, once the dashing young “Lawrence of Arabia” star, now has a mature grace and nobility. He brings out the best in Pitt, who plays Achilles as the big man on campus who’s a relative mystery beneath his muscular shell, and it’s the kind of scene moviegoers probably won’t expect from a banging, clanging summer spectacle.