Troy

There is very little artistic ambition, of course, the first consequence of which is that only rarely is there any attempt to conjure a sense of the strangeness of the very distant and foreign world from which the story comes and in which it takes place. And yes, of course, the story is told in a highly compressed way, and with many changes from what can be found in Homer.

Still, no matter how stilted it may be at times, it does try to capture the essence of the situation, and it’s quite an impressive decision to cast two big stars as the two great rivals, without either of them really being a villain, but with the biggest star playing the more morally ambiguous of the two. There are really no characters whose point of view the film portrays as unambiguously morally correct: there is a sense in which this shows the filmmakers giving the audience more credit than is usually the case with Hollywood movies and especially blockbusters. Overall, somehow I liked it more than its reputation would have suggested.

Update: Having now, three years later (writing in 2026), viewed the director’s cut: yes, it pays vastly greater attention to the heckishness of war; yes, it is edited with a superior effort to convey the rhythm and complexity of events and a fullness of character; yes, the music that has been inserted in place of James Horner’s soundtrack does absolutely nothing.