Troy

I spent the first half of Wolfgang Petersen’s epic “Troy” trying to understand why he made such a disastrous decision to cast Brad Pitt as the ultimate warrior, Achilles.

I spent the second half realizing that it just might have been an inspired choice.

That’s pretty much how I reacted to everything in the movie. In the beginning I was both skeptical and sort of bored – oh yeah, here comes another massive CGI battle scene. After “Two Towers,” my expectations for that sort of thing are ridiculously high.

But then I began to get into the groove of the story, and appreciate how the script was much better than it had a right to be. There’s a lot said in the margins about why we go to war, who suffers and who benefits. I admit that I may be an impartial observer in this regard, seeing parallels to current events where there are none. But how timely is a story about war fought on a flimsy pretext?

Plus there’s Julie Christie as Achilles’ mother, the goddess Thetis, and Peter O’Toole as Troy’s king Priam, whose scene with Achilles is definitely the high point of the film.

And then there’s Brad Pitt. When I first saw the preview and someone said, “We’re going to need the world’s greatest warrior,” followed by an image of Brad, I laughed.

But as the movie went along, I started to realize what Petersen was saying about Achilles. He wasn’t some battle-scarred veteran, an ancient Patton. He was born half-immortal, and destined for his warrior ways. He didn’t want to spend his life fighting and killing, but it was his inescapable nature. In the Salon review they said Pitt’s Achilles was a caricature of a spoiled movie star. And while they meant it as a slam, for me that’s the essence of the character.

Recommended.