TROY: BEST FORGOTTEN AFTER ALL
This might just be a footnote in the history of filmmaking but having finally seen TROY, certain things just have to be said, things not said by other film critics, most of whom have never loaded a camera, stopped traffic or been slave to a director on a set. (Attending press junkets does not a film critic make).
What the movie made me realize above all, is what geniuses Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg really are. Wolfgang Petersen is totally over his head in this movie and delivers not an epic but a film that often feels so claustrophobic in vision and scope that it reminds you more of the low budget BBC “I CLAUDIUS.”
Whereas the above masters, as well as David Lean and Akira Kurosawa, understood the art of composition, of creating a moving canvas that accentuates what is in front of the lens, Petersen compensates with a myriad of quick cuts using those annoying TV camera moves first brought to us by the folks at NYPD BLUE.
The result? Out of focus shots of warriors beating the daylights out of each other without us having any connection to what is going on (most of the time it is virtually impossible to determine who is fighting whom). Not even the fight choreography is interesting enough (apart from the scene between HECTOR and ACHILLES), leaving us saturated with yet more meaningless blood and gore. Enough already.
When Jackson pulls back and opens a glorious vista to us, it is breathtaking. When Petersen does it, it feels like we have seen it before and better. When Spielberg takes us on the beaches of Normandy we fear for our lives and curse the warmongers amongst us, when Petersen does it, we are bored.
Many of the scenes are so badly lit that all the colors melt into a toneless grey. The director of photography Roger Pratt seems to have been overwhelmed by the sharp contrast between the white sands of Troy and the dark uniforms. Somehow that was not a problem for Vittorio Storaro in APOCALYPSE NOW, or Janusz Kaminski in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Why is it here? It is hard to accept such rank mediocrity in contrast. Furthermore, the choice of lenses make the movie feel small instead of panoramic, the close ups do not feel intimate, they feel like bad television, reducing the impressive acting by Peter O'Toole and Brad Pitt instead of enhancing it.
The production design by Nigel Phelps is another major disappointment. The interior of Troy , the temples, palace etc. look like early DOCTOR WHO sets with a bit of early STAR TREK thrown in. In LORD OF THE RINGS the buildings and monuments look like stone, we can feel it. IN TROY they look like sheetrock and feel like cardboard. They deprive us of a sense of reality, we feel no awe at witnessing one of the great epics, it seems limited, cheaply tacked together and ineffective.
Usually reviews are written before a movies comes out, so why such a postscript you may ask? It is written in the hope that some of the Hollywood power brokers instrumental in greenlighting such pictures might want to find out a little bit more about the elements they are putting together before unleashing millions of dollars on them. TROY could have been a masterpiece. It is, at best a mediocre footnote, soon to be forgotten and placed on the dusty shelf of bad movies that includes the likes of last summer's HULK.
What grieves this reviewer is that so much money has been wasted on so little, that with the right director, DP and set designer this could have been something to add to one's DVD collection.
On the same note, imagine for instance if Spielberg had actually gotten to direct HARRY POTTER: THE SORCERER'S STONE, or Tim Burton THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS, instead of the terminally shallow Chris Columbus?
These are the kinds of decisions that studio executives need to make, and the feeling we get is that they simply don't know the difference. It worries us what else this kind of approach to movie making is going to present us with in the future and what other great stories they are going to mess up.
Not every director is cut out to direct epics. We are lucky if in every generation we have one or two who can do it. If they are busy, do not make the movie, shelve it.
First Published at WriteMovies.com
© rossWWmedia, Corp. 2004