Studio: Warner, UK/Malta & Helena Ltd / Warner Home Entertainment (USA)

 

Video:

Aspect ratio: 2.40:1

Feature film: 1080p / VC-1

196 minutes

Supplements: HD/SD

1 disc BD-50

 

Audio:

English PCM 5.1

English DD 5.1

French DD 5.1

Spanish DD 5.1

 

Subtitles:

English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean & Portuguese

 

Extras

Making-of Featurettes:

• Troy Revisited: An Introduction by Wolfgang Petersen

• Troy in Focus

• In the Thick of Battle

• From Ruins to Reality

• Troy in Focus

• Troy: An Effects Odyssey

• Attacking Troy

• Theatrical trailer

 

46 chapters

Standard Blu-ray case

Release Date: September 18, 2007

 

Troy: Director's Cut ~ Comment

This edition of Troy, like Alexander Revisited, released on Blu-ray by Warner at the same time (and to which I shall make a few comparisons here), is a re-cut of the original film.  In this case, adding some 30 minutes, some of it fleshing out, so to speak, the relationship of Helen and Paris and going some way to explain the whys and wherefores of their fated fever.  Also included is more bickering between Achilles and Agamemnon, which can only be a good thing.  However, I could have done without the extra gore and fake blood in the battle scenes.  All in all, though, the extra time is worth the price of admission. 

 

I enjoy this movie, either way, so the “Director's Cut” is a good thing and even better in this Blu-ray edition.  I don’t happen to one of the many critics who get all worked up about the ways this story is unfaithful to Homer’s version of events.  3000 years after the fact, it’s hard for me to be concerned over discrepancies – even big ones such as compressing a ten year war into what seems to be a couple of weeks, or less big ones such as how Agamemnon meets his maker.  Unlike Oliver Stone’s film, there appears to be no historian looking over Petersen’s shoulder.  But then, unlike Stone’s film, the scale is more intimate, less epic, less ambitious – and for all that, and despite that shortening the war makes the events less credible in purely dramatic terms, Troy is the much more satisfying of the two – helped by a more subtle and even-handed script.  When Agamemnon says that Achilles "can't be controlled – he's likely to fight us a s the Trojans."  Nestor replies, "We don't need to control him, we need to unleash him."

 

 

 

More so than Alexander, I found the casting here to be convincing purely in terms of appearance.  However, the line readings are all over the map.  I have to say, however, that I was not particularly distressed by this – I'm not sure why.  Perhaps I was aided by having recently watched MGM's 1935 Midsummer Night's Dream.  Brad Pitt may be the Dick Powell of his time in this regard, but I felt he looked and acted ever so much more the warrior than Colin Farrell did a leader of men in Alexander.

 

My guess is that whatever you expect by seeing this movie, you won't be disappointed.  It certainly won't be Homer or history.  But you knew that, right? 

 

So, what do we get?  For starters: Brad Pitt, looking bronzed, beautiful and athletic.  Is it a stretch to say, godlike?  His Achilles is the complete narcissist – the supreme warrior with a thousand-year stare into history.  He may not be aware of his demigod status, but he certainly knows he's a superhero.

 

On the other hand, one thing this movie is not about is Helen – you know, the woman who launched a thousand ships.  Well, this is not that Helen, let me assure you.  Ten ships, maybe.  It's not that supermodel Diane Kruger isn't beautiful – and there is more of that beauty to admire through Paris' eyes in this new Director's Cut - but her beauty is embarrassingly superficial, if only because she isn't actress enough to project it from within.  But that doesn't really matter, for the script and all the players are quite clear that this war is not about her.

 

If you know who Eric Bana is, then you'll find him here as well, looking all loyal in his quiet authority.  Bana was the soldier who comes out of nowhere in Black Hawk Down to provide the necessary anchor to neophyte Marines pinned down in a bewildering street fight in Somalia.  I felt he was less successful in Hulk, but so was everything else about that movie.  He has since found himself, or perhaps I should say, lost himself properly in Spielberg's Munich.  (My guess is that Bana would have made a more satisfactory Aragorn than Viggo Mortensen.)  Here Bana is Hector, and he could hardly be more different from Achilles.

 

The confrontations between Hector and Achilles have drama and destiny written all over them.  The one-on-one fight sequences are brilliant. Pitt has a great attack gambit, leaping and whirling over his opponent's shoulder and striking down through the main arteries.  And he does this twirling thing with his shield that serves to rev up his engine as he moves in for the kill.  Brilliant!  The big duel between Hector and Achilles doesn't disappoint - though coming before the Horse, it turns out to be a little anti-climactic.

 

It isn't so much that Orlando Bloom as Paris terrible, it’s that Paris is terrible – or at least he is written as such a self-serving adolescent that we want Hector to throw his brother overboard the moment he learns of his betrayal.  Paris only goes downhill from there.  On the other hand, his being such a coward makes the irony of his eventual murder of Achilles that much more tragic.

 

Agamemnon, played with zestful venom by Brian Cox, ruler of just about all of what there was of Greece at the time, can hardly stand it that he is unable to win his battles without Achilles, and that he is chronically in his debt.  At a critical moment in the war, he complains to his generals: "He's as likely to spear me as to talk to me."  As compensation, he agrees to return the priestess, Briseis, to Achilles: "He can have the damn girl.  I haven't touched her. I gave her to the men.  They need some amusement – after today."

 

Finally, there's King Priam, represented as a wash of Goya by Peter O'Toole.  His advisors - sycophants all, as is the case in our time - are so full of themselves and their country's past victories that they easily assure him of their invincibility.   Even so, Priam has reasons of his own to defend his errant son, as the new Director's Cut makes more clear.

 

It is no accident that absent from this mythic melodrama are the gods themselves.  There are no visuals of the heavens.  No thunderbolts.  No voices from on high.  No dialog between the humans and gods of any sort. There is, however, a good deal of reference to gods, especially in Achilles' many disrespectful gestures, despite the admonishments of those around him.  Perhaps this was Peterson and Benioff's way of making this story pertinent to our time.  Not because the gods are no longer here, but because they are – at least in the sense that Man's folly still has devastating consequences.  And that free will without accountability and discipline – God, if you will - leads to folly.

 

Troy: Director's Cut ~ The Score Card

 

The Movie : 7.5

Just as Agamemnon subdues the last of the Grecian kingdoms, his brother, Manelaus, king of Sparta, implores him to attack Troy to wrest his wife, Helen, from the clutches of the youth, Paris, who has stolen her from under his very house. Agamemnon's thirst for dominion is thereby kick-started by Paris's brazen act, since undefeated Troy, which lies across the sea, has always been outside of his grasp.  Now he has the excuse to rally all his armies to an attack.  But for his plan to succeed he requires the aid of Achilles and his Myrmidons.  Achilles, Agamemnon is always quick to point out, fights for no king save his own heroic destiny, and so he enlists the aid of Odysseus to persuade Achilles.  Meanwhile, Hector, Paris' older and wiser brother, reconsiders his impulse to send Paris and Helen back to Sparta, knowing that Paris would be skewered.  Their father, Priam, king of Troy, finds a way to support that decision with the help of his generals and priests, all of whose names seem to be Hubris.  By the time Agamemnon's armies land at the shores of Troy (think: Normandy on D-Day), it is clear to all concerned that this battle is no longer about Helen.

 

 

 

Though hopelessly outnumbered, Troy puts up a valiant fight with its insurmountable walls and smarter strategies of defense.  The Greeks are granted a fateful stroke of tragic luck when Achilles' dearest friend, Patroclus, is killed by Hector, believing him to be Achilles.  (After all, the subtitle of Homer's epic poem is "The Rage of Achilles.") The inevitable duel follows.  Still, Troy does not fall until the idea of the great wooden horse is conceived.  The rest, as they say, is history.

 

Image : 9 (9/9.5)

The score of 9 indicates a relative level of excellence compared to other Blu-ray DVDs.  The score in parentheses represents: first, a value for the image in absolute terms; and, second, how that image compares to what I believe is the current best we can expect in the theatre.

 

High definition DVD, perhaps unfairly, and certainly cruelly, invites us to be more critical about picture quality in ways that the theatrical presentation does not.  The image here is fairly uniform – just a tad soft, but always appropriately filmlike.  As the camera looks into the distance, armies and ships become increasingly less clear, as some Blu-ray titles do not.  My score of 9, therefore, might be a little generous.