film review: troy

for all of the beauty in troy--and by beauty, I mean the landscape, some very nicely done set construction and cinematography, and brad pitt's nicely toned ass--it's just an annoying movie.

it pretended to be all deep, with a whole bunch of meditations on immortality and fate and destiny, and war and soliders and duty, but really, it just cheaply touched the latter themes enough to serve as a commmentary on today's situation in Iraq, and its treatment of the first was fair enough for pop psychology but a huge disservice, imho, to its real themes, about destiny. and I won't even discuss the odd relationship it seemed to have with religion in its continued discussions about the gods...oy. they all seemed very heavy-handed efforts at acheiving depth in a movie that should have just accepted its superficiality and gotten on with it.

other commnets:

1) Patroclus as Achilles' cousin!? sigh. people understand that the greeks had man-on-man action...can't we just get past this and depict it accurately instead of turning the movie into some bad breeder love story?

2) Eric Bana performed excellently as Hektor and Orlando Bloom's turn as the pathetic Paris was pretty good. a huge filming error, though, as in one scence Bloom sprouts some stubble in his big fight scence that wasn't there at the beginning of the scene (and of course I know since I was watching closely). Brad Pitt, though a beauty, sounded completely horrible spouting off about life and death and the gods. sigh...

3) whatever happened to "beware strangers bearing gifts"?!? see above re: religion.

looking forward to The Day After Tomorrow, which will be assuredly atrocious (thus, a critique such as this one will not be necessary as it doesn't pretend to be a good movie) but stars Jake Gyllenhall and thus necessitates viewing. I've heard good things about Shrek 2 as well.