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A film that may evoke more Troy Donahue and the golden era of Hollywood than the doomed city and the ancient age of Homer’s epic, Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy replaces the gods (not a bad idea, given 1983’s camp classic Clash of the Titans) with the 21st century’s new deities of computer-generated special effects and celebrity icons. As a Cliffs Notes version of the Iliad, this gets right to the medias of the res: Paris (Orlando Bloom as a callow youth rather than the immortal one in Lord of the Rings) meets Helen (Diane Kruger, a pretty face), wife of old Spartan fart Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson). Paris and Helen flee to Troy despite the objections of Paris’s older brother Hector (Eric Bana, best in the cast). Power-hungry Agamemnon (Brian Cox in curly wig and skirt and enjoying every hammy minute) uses this as an excuse to attack the evildoers and take over the region. Stop me before I bring up another gratuitous Iraq War analogy. But this is where the real stars of the show come in. The CGI-ed thousand ships en route to Ilium evoke a chill, but for my money (considerably less than Troy’s budget of a quarter of a billion), I’ll take the first glimpse of the Allied armada in The Longest Day. Playing Achilles, Brad Pitt impresses with his swordplay and his pin-up pecs, and he brings an edge of melancholy to the demi-god when he’s not shouting army-recruitment slogans to the Myrmidons ("Immortality is yours! Take it!"). But the Achilles’ heel of such epic making is that Hollywood no longer has the talent or the innocence to pull it off. (165 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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