Troy (2004)

Rotten Tomatoes: 54%

Box Office: 497.4 million USD

My Rating: 2/10

Description: It is a retelling of Homer's famous epic poem about the Trojan War, The Iliad. When King Menelaus of Sparta's (Brendan Gleeson) wife Helen (Diane Kruger) runs away with the Trojan prince Paris (Orlando Bloom), he and the rest of the Greek army must fight in a ten-year-long bloody war to get her back.

My Thoughts: As a formerly huge Greek mythology nerd, I knew it wouldn't be good, but I honestly didn't expect to be as thoroughly disappointed as I was. For some reason I will never know, this was one of the highest-grossing movies of 2004. I watched it when I was fifteen for the sole purpose of counting the historical inaccuracies. I counted thirty-five, but looking back, the number is probably much higher. The entire story is just about the mortals, which was entirely the wrong way to go. The Greek gods were as flawed and imperfect as the humans were, and you can't tell the story of The Iliad without them playing a huge part. There is a lot of controversy around the different tellings about whether Helen left on her own accord, if she was kidnapped, or if it was a mixture of the two. In this version, she had already been cheating on her husband with Paris as opposed to just meeting him when he arrived at Sparta. Achilles (Brad Pitt) also obviously plays a huge part, but his character was done so dirty. For starters, he and Patroclus are simply "bro cousins" despite the fact that they are one of the best love stories in classic literature. They had their ashes buried in the same cup, for goodness' sake, which was a common practice among married couples. As a matter of fact, the umbrella term for queer men is quite literally "Achillean". Not only that, but when Patroclus gets killed, Achilles doesn't go on his murderous spree, nor does he yell so loud that the Trojan camp can hear him; both of which happen in the original telling. Brad Pitt simply can't capture the utter rage that was present in the original epic poem, along with almost every other retelling. One crucial thing that was left out was the mention of his near-immortality, save for his heel. Without it, the arrow going through his heel made absolutely no sense. Another thing is that Hector (Eric Bana) is far too noble, especially since we're supposed to root for the Greeks. Menelaus and Ajax are both killed in battle, which was simply not supposed to happen and made me very upset, and Hector's death, to my disappointment, was extremely anticlimactic. I can't fully blame Diane Kruger for her poor acting job; I suppose she's one of those actors who can't do a good job with a terrible script. The icing on the already insane cake is that for some odd reason, everyone in this movie is British, save for Helen, who speaks in Kruger's natural German accent. If you'd like to see a much, much better movie with both Brad Pitt and Diane Kruger in it (that was surprisingly only made five years after this one), I would highly recommend Inglourious Basterds.

Best Line: "Let it burn! Let Troy burn!"