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| All images courtesy: Arrow Video and Warner Bros |
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is without question the film of the summer. So it’s no surprise that one of the boutique labels would try to get in on the action by releasing a swanky new special edition of the last major Homeric Hollywood epic from semi-recent memory, Wolfgang Petersen’s loose adaptation of The Iliad, Troy (2004). Troy has always been somewhat divisive. Greek mythology afficionados tend to take issue with its substantial deviations from the source material. Its different cuts have very different reputations, with the theatrical cut leaving many viewers cold, with its rushed pacing and underdeveloped characterization, while the half-hour-longer director’s cut is widely seen as a massive improvement and a far better film. But it has always had plenty of admirers, who have always been engrossed by its visual splendor, its grandiose old-fashioned-epic scale, and its fantastic cast. Arrow’s 4K special edition certainly welcomes reappraisal, and interestingly, upon this rerelease Troy works surprisingly well as a companion piece Iliad to Nolan’s Odyssey, with similar preoccupations about the cruel futility of war, and a similar focus on the reality of the characters over the more mystical aspects of Greek myth. So let’s break the walls of Troy’s box set, and see what Arrow has to offer.
THE FILM:
When Helen (Diane Kruger), the unhappy younger wife of Spartan king Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), attempts to escape her home and leave her husband for the charismatic prince Paris (Orlando Bloom) of Troy, the two star-crossed lovers unknowingly start a war of mythological proportions. Power-hungry king of the Greek empire Agamemnon (Brian Cox) sees the relationship conflict as the perfect excuse to invade and take over Troy from its elderly king Priam (Peter O’Toole). Soon the two sides are caught in a vicious siege, with warriors on both sides trying to maintain some semblance of honor – principally Achilles (Brad Pitt), Odysseus (Sean Bean), and Hector (Eric Bana) – but all being consumed by the savage cruelty of war. What follows is a grand-scale epic period piece which is as much a throwback to the old-fashioned “cast of thousands” Hollywood costume drama (a la Ben Hur or Spartacus) as it is a post-Lord of the Rings action/adventure blockbuster.
The battles and combat scenes are truly epic: massive in scale, very impressive in fight choreography, and very violent (particularly in the director’s cut), in a way that feels boundary-pushing and modern. But the movie is just as much or moreso about court intrigue and the cruel machinations of war, and more drama than action. This combination of old and new – an old-Hollywood-style epic costume drama given teeth by its bloody and well-choreographed fight scenes – is exactly what makes it such an interesting film. Director Wolfgang Petersen by this point was an old hand at blockbuster filmmaking, having helmed movies like Das Boot, The Neverending Story, In the Line of Fire, Outbreak, and Air Force One, and his vision for Troy is a very compelling one. Visually, he absolutely nails his goal of updating the grandiose historical epic for the new millennium. This is a dazzlingly well-shot movie, with swooping, kinetic, beautifully-framed anamorphic camerawork, shot on location with substantial chunks filmed at magic hour. Petersen and cinematographer Roger Pratt (the longtime director of photography for Terry Gilliam, among other things) are in top visual form here, and this new 4k HDR restoration really underscores what a great-looking movie this is. And while Petersen has directed plenty of great action across his career, the action here may be some of his best – especially in the director’s cut, with the gory, intense fights having a heavy-hitting, visceral impact.
The excellent cast absolutely understands the epic-costume-drama assignment, and under Petersen’s sure direction, they do a great job of selling all the court intrigue, political machinations, and internal conflicts about honor and the will of gods. Eric Bana and Sean Bean in particular do an excellent job of bringing gravitas to their heroic roles, as characters who serve to anchor the movie and sell its emotional stakes. As the two warring kings, Brian Cox absolutely devours the scenery as the power-hungry Agamemnon, while Peter O’Toole brings his classical stage-actor presence to a great late-career performance. It must be said that Brad Pitt as Achilles is not one of the better actors in the cast: he struggles the most with the period dialogue, and his line deliveries still sound like a modern actor, never fully disappearing into the character. Fortunately he also has less dialogue than most, and the film requires Achilles to be more of a compelling physical presence than a dramatic lead; a side of the character which he handles much better. And when an ensemble is this large, and made up of this many excellent actors, a few lesser performances can easily get carried by the group.
Unfortunately, while the film’s visual artistry, Petersen’s direction, and the cast are all rock solid, David Benioff (Game of Thrones)’s script for Troy is a mixed bag, and definitely the film’s weakest link. Much of the film’s dialogue is quite good, but some scenes can be quite melodramatic and overstated, in a way that thanklessly falls to the cast to sell. The script is too self-referential about its own place in Greek mythology: right from the beginning, characters constantly talk about how “people will be talking about this war for thousands of years,” and Achilles’ motivation for participating in the war is that he wants the immortality of featuring prominently in a mythical tale. He might as well be saying that his motivation is that he wants to be the main character in The Iliad. This is, of course, accurate to the myth, wherein arrogance and hubris and chasing glory are Achilles’ fatal flaws, but it is written in a way that feels too obvious, as though the characters are aware that they are in a myth. The script also stumbles a bit in the back half, where it feels too time-compressed, and speeds through the Trojan war a bit too much. We never really get a proper sense of time-scale, or a feeling that this war takes ten years; it feels instead as though the war takes just a few weeks. And as mentioned earlier in this review, the movie plays fast and loose with the actual mythology, going off-book quite a bit, with character fates and turns of events that significantly differ from The Iliad itself. Whether this bothers you will depend from viewer to viewer; having not read The Iliad in many many years, I was not bothered, since the plot as modified for the screenplay certainly works well, but especially if you have The Odyssey freshly in mind from seeing Nolan's film, some of the ways in which the films don’t line up (characters who die when they are supposed to survive and be part of The Odyssey, etc) are quite noticeable.
Fortunately these are all fairly minor gripes; it’s not a bad script, it’s just a flawed and not great one, which is sometimes too melodramatic for its own good. But the excellent cast and Petersen’s confident and stylish direction carry it, and make these flaws relatively easy to overlook, when on the whole the film works quite well. And of course, this is especially true in the director’s cut, which is a substantially better version of the film.
Troy often gets discussed as one of those films where the extra footage added back in for the director’s cut makes a huge difference to the experience, and it is absolutely true. For the sake of completionism it’s cool that Arrow included both cuts here, but I would strongly advise viewers (especially first-time viewers) to only watch the director’s cut. In his introduction to the cut (from 2007), director Wolfgang Petersen talks about how the theatrical cut was trimmed as drastically as it was purely to meet a studio-dictated runtime, regardless of what was best for the story, and he refers to it as a painful experience. The director’s cut is the movie we were supposed to get in the first place, and it works much better. Most of the added runtime consists of dramatic scenes between various characters, and as a result there is substantially better and clearer character development, which gives the motives and emotions much more room to breathe. Relationships and motives that felt rushed, sketchy, and perfunctory in the theatrical cut work very well here, with crucial scenes restored, and the performances get more moments to shine. And because everything feels more coherent and well-developed and makes more sense, this is one of those paradoxical cases where despite being half an hour longer than the theatrical cut, it doesn’t FEEL as long because the narrative flow works better. Freed from the constraints of an R rating, the director’s cut is also much more bloody and brutal in its action scenes, making the battles even more impressive. It is also a much hornier movie, with a very bisexual gaze, and equal amounts of male and female nudity from its very good-looking cast. Petersen says in his introduction that the studio was squeamish about both the blood and the sensuality, and demanded both be reduced, in addition to the arbitrary runtime reduction. And on all counts Petersen is vindicated here, as this cut is narratively stronger, better paced, and more impactful.
Troy may be a loose adaptation of The Iliad, with many changes made and liberties taken, but as a Homer-inspired historical epic in its own right, it is very good, especially in Petersen’s preferred version. It also has a few major similarities to Nolan’s The Odyssey, which makes it an interesting companion piece in some key ways. Like Nolan’s film, it downplays the role of gods in the story, opting for a more grounded approach that focuses on character and themes. And also like Nolan’s film, it very much focuses on themes about the horrors and senselessness of war, which are meant to echo in our own time. There is no purely good and purely evil side to this conflict: Priam and Hector and the Trojans are far more sympathetic, and Agamemnon is clearly the villain, but both armies have noble, likable heroes who we want to root for, who we don’t want to see die, and yet who also do some pretty horrible things in the name of war. It is by design a morally murky film, in a way that is unusual for a blockbuster, but is thematically quite compelling, and which definitely echoes Nolan’s themes in his Odyssey. The narrative deviations from Homer’s text mean that you absolutely cannot watch Nolan’s Odyssey as a sequel to Petersen’s Iliad; the stories don’t line up because of the liberties taken. But thematically, they make very interesting companion pieces. Revisiting Troy having just seen The Odyssey makes it a very compelling experience indeed.
THE ARROW VIDEO LIMITED EDITION:
Troy comes to us on a 3-disc set, in blu-ray and 4K UHD variants. The director’s cut and theatrical cut are both presented in new 4k restorations on separate discs, with HDR on the UHDs. The new restoration is absolutely stunning. The movie looks spectacular, with extremely rich, vibrant, vivid colors, and beautiful contrast, which really pops; it benefits massively from the 4k restoration and HDR. It also looks nicely filmic, with no noticeable DNR, though the movie was shot with a stock that gives it an extremely fine and subtle grain structure. It is a reference-grade transfer, and one of the best-looking discs I’ve seen lately. Fans should be thrilled.
Unfortunately, aside from a couple essays in the booklet, that new transfer is where the new material for this Arrow special edition ends. The set has a whole disc of special features, of which there are a lot… but they are entirely archival special features, carried over from Warner Bros’ previous DVDs and blu-rays. No new extras have been produced for this release, which really feels like a wasted opportunity. It also makes the release seem like a bit of a rush job, as though getting it on store shelves while The Odyssey is in theaters was a higher priority than producing new bonus content.
The archival extras are, however, extremely extensive and very good. If they’re new to you, then this disc really contains about all the behind-the-scenes goodies that you could really want; the problem is more for people who already own the previous studio disc, because this offers nothing you haven’t seen before, and thus less reason to double-dip. The archival extras start out with a very good “picture-in-picture commentary” over the theatrical cut of the film, which is less of a traditional commentary, and more of a curated selection of interviews with director Wolfgang Petersen, writer David Benioff, and members of the cast and crew, which pop up in a second frame throughout the film. The interviews are very good, and it makes for a very interesting watch, with an impressively wide range of voices from the production brought in. Then there is an almost half-hour multi-chapter interview with Petersen, as he goes into the production of the film, and specifically the changes he made in assembling his director’s cut. Fun fact – Petersen reveals that he actually took Latin classes at the private school he attended as a child, so the first time he read and fell in love with The Iliad and The Odyssey, it was indeed in the original Latin. The extras then continue with a series of excellent, very interesting and in-depth 10-to-17-minute featurettes about the film’s combat training and stuntwork, its production design, its visual effects and sound design, and the process of adapting The Iliad to a modern script. They all add up to an extremely thorough document of Troy’s production, featuring an impressive amount of behind-the-scenes voices.
Still, the set is an odd one to review. In terms of the quality of the extras, this is an absolutely stacked special edition, with great features that leave little more to be desired. And yet, literally all of them are carried over from the equally-stacked studio discs that have been available ever since 2007. So if, like me, this is your first time owning Troy on disc, then this edition is great. But if you already own the previous discs, nothing will be new to you except for the transfer. So in spite of the excellent extras that are here, I can’t help but feel like the disc is disappointing, and a wasted opportunity, because there is nothing to make this Arrow edition unique, besides that the movie looks the best it ever has. Is it really worth the swanky limited-edition moniker, when it’s really just a transfer-only upgrade? If you don’t already own one of those previous discs, then sure. If you do, it might be a tougher decision. The new 4k restoration is absolutely spectacular, though, and at the very least, this is a definitive visual presentation. And for a movie this opulent and visually stunning, that is worth a lot.
- Christopher S. Jordan