Troy

Watching Troy gave me the sense not of watching a great epic movie, but of seeing several contemporary love stories set in ancient time, romanticized and exaggerated. On the whole, it was not a bad movie. It just was not great either. All I got to see was three foolish men: Paris, Patroclus, and King Priam.

Paris had the gall to ignore the affair of the world and decided to kidnap Helen. Hector killed Patroclus because he thought that Patroclus was Achilles, whom he really wanted to kill because Achilles defaced Apollo's temple. Then, there was King Priam, who made not just the first mistake of not trying to return Helen back to her husband, but also allowed the Trojan Horse to enter and breach the famed wall.

Moreover, although Homer's Iliad recounts the war of Troy as taking ten years to fight, the so-called epic of Troy seemed to have taken little more than sixteen days. It felt too short, I didn't sense any length of time to show how men aged. Wouldn't Paris, played by Harold Bloom, look a little older? Wouldn't Helen develop a line or two on her face?

In the end, I concede grudgingly that without such a war that had a thousand ships, we would never have remembered such great figures as Achilles, Hector, Odysseus (who got little screen time), and other warriors. There are no known gods or goddesses participating, as Homer's Iliad described. In summary, this was a modern movie made for the post-theological age, where men and women make choices that bound their fate. Perhaps crucially, this was a quintessentially American movie, which holds that it is individual choice that shapes our destiny, not the intervention of divinity.

Indeed, Achilles explained to Briseis, with whom he fell in love, how the gods and goddesses envy us because of our mortality. He says that it was the fact that we can die that makes our moment sweeter and incite us to passion and despair, and gods and goddesses who cannot die cannot thus hope to understand what it means to be participants in this great stage of life, with the world our oyster.

You would never hear such stuff coming from Homer. From Shakespeare, you would hear of Achilles being a "petulant homosexual"--as Harold Bloom described him, I think--but from this movie made in this time and age, you hear of love, war, and peace defined by the three men who are engaged in all three: Paris, Hector, and Achilles.

The movie is great, I would give it a sturdy recommendation for those who can stand sitting in front of the TV for a good amount of daylight watching history happens.