Here was my review:
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"Like Pearl Harbor, Troy Bombs"
What a waste of a few hours and several hundred millions of dollars. "Troy" tries to be too much all at once, and in the end, is pretty bad at everything. There is nothing in this movie, except for Brad Pitt's naked butt, that hasn't been done better elsewhere:
- Epic battle sequences: Braveheart.
- The tragedy of war: Saving Private Ryan.
- Roman-era man-on-man fights: Gladiator.
- Period romance: Rob Roy
The dialog is flat, both in writing and delivery. The acting is one-dimensional. The cinematography is amateurish. The sets are monochromatic. The costumes, at least, are accurate.
The plot should have been the one part of this movie that was impossible to screw up, since Homer basically perfected it 3000 years ago, but no, it had to be "Hollywood-ized". Instead of an epic poem about a siege, we get a Grecian-era bodice-ripper, but with uninteresting, flat characters. I swear to god if one more woman begs a soldier not to go to battle I'm going to gag. This is my impression of "Troy":
Wife: "Don't go."
Soldier: "I have to go."
W: "Don't go, you don't have to."
S: "Yes, I do. You know I have to."
W: "No, you don't. Please, don't go."
S: "I have no choice, I have to."
etc....
I mean, you're married to a soldier. What do you expect him to do when the city is besieged?!
In addition to the fact that I think this is just genuinely a bad movie, this movie offended me in much the same way as Pearl Harbor did. I find the "pop-ification" of actual horriffic events to be distasteful. It's one thing to show a terrible event like WWII with some honesty and reverence ("Private Ryan", for example), but to simply use the event as a setting for your insipid little high-school melodrama is disrespectful, even if it was 3,000 years ago.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm no longer tintillated by ultra-realistic violence and gore for its own sake. In a world where we can see Nicholas Berg (the Pennsylvania businessman whose beheading at the hands of Iraqui militants was videotaped and released on the Internet) being beheaded FOR REAL, it just doesn't seem entertaining to me to watch Brad Pitt chop off somebody's head on the screen. Not when the violence itself--designed to evoke an emotional response that we will hopefully accept in lieu of entertainment--is all there is, without any deeper meaning, intent, or even plot to back it up.
I really really highly recommend you see one of the four movies that I listed above INSTEAD OF this absolute bore of a movie. In fact, I think I'm going to watch Rob Roy again just to wash the taste of "Troy" out of my mouth.
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