[A well made bad movie]



A battlefield
Thousands and thousands of soldiers will battle because the mean king wants to conquer everything just out of greed
The good king begs him to be reasonable and proposes a deal:
Choose your best fighter to battle against mine and whoever wins the battle wins his king that war and thousands of lives will be spared

The mean king agrees

The good king's fighter emerges out of the rows of soldiers, amongst cheers of anticipated victory. He's an ugly looking scarred bald giant.
Woooo we're supposed to be afraid
Who in hell will be crazy enough to battle this dude, and more important, who has a chance to win against him!?

The mean king yells out "ACHILES!" a few times
Achiles is not there.. someone is gone to fetch him

Cue to Brad Pitt's tent where he is still sleeping in the arms of a gorgeous creature (we don't even need to see her face to know that she is) and zoom out to reveal another girl sleeping there too
*Laughs from the Ontarian male audience in a eheheh-lucky bastard-I too have done that quite a few times/I wish I could have that too, way*
*Sighs from the Ontarian female audience in a aaaahhhhhhh-I soooo wish I could be one of those two girls right now*

His king (He is not MY king - Brad Pitt in a defiant-allez-toute-chier-tout-le-monde-way) is summoning him to the battle field and his eyes still puffy and full of sleep, he walks through the soldiers, never stopping, past everybody, past the king who says something bitchy to the effect that next time they'll have a war when it better accomodates his schedule, walks up to the ugly Brutus who stands there and before the big ugly thing even has a chance to lift his arm, Brad Pitt does a super-summersault type pirouette, and mortally stabs the giant through his shoulder.. turns around, not even stopping and keeps walking as the dead-ugly-beast/giant falls to the ground

And there's our first hint that "Troy" is a mistake for the movie's title
"Pitt" would have been more appropriate
The movie is not about Troy, except in the efforts to make a magnificent epic movie by showing beautiful landscapes and seas and cliffs of Troy and Greece.
Other than that, even Helen takes a back seat to Pitt's Achiles character. In the Brad Pitt's version of the Trojan War, she is portrayed as a little quiet/shy girl of unbelievable beauty who fell in love with Paris instead of staying with the mean king and who doesn't say 20 lines in the whole 3 hours

Hell, even the Tojan Horse, becomes just a prop to show off Brad's muscles when he reppels down the horse's flank
I'm surprised they didn't try to pass off the Horse as his idea too...
(Maybe it's in the deleted scenes)

Basically, the whole movie is a Brad Pitt's impression of Russell Crowe's Gladiator, (minus the charisma Crowe had in that particular movie) in a Lord of the Ring imitation setting

Achiles,
le héro sans peur, et surtout sans reproche,
the valliant warrior, rebellious as hell, defiant of authority, but with a conscience,
who kills everybody without hesitation but saves the prisonner priestess girl
and who enters Troy in the Trojan Horse but not to pillage and burn the city,
no no... not him
He comes to rescue the girl and while we see his companions murdering people and burning the city, our super hero-with-a-heart-of-gold-now-that-he's-fallen-in-love runs through the streets of Troy yelling her name in a desperate attemps to save her

Sad.. really really sad
No doubts the effects are well made, les prises de vue grandioses et superbes,
but as far as the rest goes, it's a big BLEEEUHHH
I did not sign up to see a Brad Pitt epic and see how many pouting poses his unaturally pink lips can make from under a helmet.

One positive thing:
I was gratefull I got to see "Troy - The Epic of Brad Pitt" in theaters
that way I got to enjoy the scenery and the music/battle effects to their fullest
I KNOW if I had rented it and watched it at home without the full effect of the deafening sound of clashing swords, I most probably would have fallen asleep