Atroycity
The film under consideration calls itself "Troy."
inthane-chan was [link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=155339|right about this one]: it sucked. I had not approached it imagining that the collision of Hollywood and Homer could be anything but a trainwreck (or in this context, I suppose, a shipwreck), but I was naively unprepared to the violence done to the source material ("Inspired" by The Iliad? How about "vaguely suggested by a third-hand rumor of The Iliad"?) It wasn't Brad Pitt's performance that put me off, although where Homer had Achilles sulking in his tent BP merely pouted, and I frankly didn't much care for it when my wedded spouse made favorable remarks about Pitt's washboard torso and brought up anew the suggestion that we should join a gym. I could barely tolerate the deaths during the course of the campaign of both Menelaus and Agamemnon, who each survived the Trojan campaign in Homer's version quite handily, thank you very much, although I note that Agamemnon's demise does leave Aeschylus rather at loose ends. The absence of the Olympian pantheon, who are scarcely bit players in Homer, might be forgiven on the grounds that the director chooses to focus on men and not Jungian projections. But, my droogies, I submit that when your screen representation of the Achaeans' ten-year siege of Troy is conveniently compressed into about three weeks between the invading fleet hitting the beaches and the city being sacked, then something important has been lost. If Wolfgang Peterson's team had tackled the WWII Pacific campaign in this spirit, then the Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor would have been followed up by the Battle of Midway later in the same week, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki no later than the solstice, and the end of the formal occupation government before Christmas.
Dreadful. I picked it up used for eight bucks, but even at that price feel vaguely ripped-off. If you're unfamiliar with the source material (which is only, you know, the fountainhead of the entire tradition of western literature), then it may be an acceptable action pic: certainly it's a handsome visual spectacle. If you have an ounce of respect for Homer, you'll avoid it the way Achilles should have avoided Paris' arrow through his...as my wife said, "wait a minute, shouldn't that have been his..." "No, darling," I replied, "in this filmmaker's universe it's apparently Achilles' ankle."
feeling ever more like an exile in my culture,
