Troy
2004 · Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
Original language: English
- action
- adventure
The story
In year 1250 B.C. during the late Bronze age, two emerging nations begin to clash. Paris, the Trojan prince, convinces Helen, Queen of Sparta, to leave her husband Menelaus, and sail with him back to Troy. After Menelaus finds out that his wife was taken by the Trojans, he asks his brother Agamemnon to help him get her back. Agamemnon sees this as an opportunity for power. They set off with 1,000 ships holding 50,000 Greeks to Troy.
What it’s like
Broad, sun-bleached Mediterranean light falls on sweeping wide shots of sand, sea and sprawling city walls, with the bronze armour catching glare and the palette leaning toward ochre, dust and deep blue. Battle scenes are handheld and churning, cut with slow crane moves over massed armies, and the score swells with brass and drums during set pieces before dropping to a quiet strings-and-woodwind hush in the intimate tents and palace rooms. The vibe is epic and weighty, with a sense of gilded ambition curdling into grief, a glossy classical-Hollywood sweep that suits a long weekend afternoon or a big-screen night with friends. Pacing is steady and sometimes ponderous, building through its war councils and duels toward a series of violent, bloody clashes; the violence is frequent and graphic, with swordplay, arrows and bodies falling in numbers, though the gore stays on the conventional side of the epic genre. Sexual content is limited to a few romantic scenes with nudity implied rather than shown. Emotionally it moves between swaggering bravado and sombre reckoning, following men and women whose vanity and loyalties lead them into ruin. It is for viewers who want spectacle, old-world myth and a grand, tragic scale rather than anything gentle or quiet.
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