Troy

4/5 stars

I know. I know. Brad Pitt in a summer blockbuster just can’t be good. Now, I’m not a huge Brad Pitt fan (I think partly because I started hearing the no-showering rumors were true), but he was not nearly as annoying as I was expecting. I dare say he wasn’t bad in fact. The performances in Troy were overall quite good — in particular, I liked Eric Bana as Hector and Orlando Bloom as Paris — though there were a few clinckers. I wasn’t impressed with Agamemnon (Brian Cox).

Fortunately, I’ve never read the Iliad, so I wasn’t burdoned with knowing the inaccuracies in the movie. I quite liked the story, though some of the battle scenes could have been shortened. It was interesting that the director/writer/whoever chose to write the influence of the gods out. There is no golden apple. Achilles’ mom is not a sea nymph. Achiles dies from several arrows to his chest (though he pulls those out, leaving one in his heel).

Good, fun, summer movie.