I saw Troy last night. I live close to the At­las the­ater, which sports the largest screen in South Amer­i­ca (although, sad­ly, no THX sound), which is well suit­ed for this kind of thing.

And it is a tra­di­tion­al movie. It´s like Cleopa­tra, on­ly the girl can´t act and the guy is not a mid­dle-aged al­co­holic.

I think Ebert got it right when he said that the ac­tors are try­ing to make their char­ac­ters hu­man, and it´s coun­ter­pro­duc­tive be­cause the char­ac­ters in the Il­i­ad are not hu­man, they are archetype­s.

It´s a damn greek tragedy! The whole idea of greek tragedy is men with­out will be­ing thrown in­to their fates by evil god­s. I won­der how the greeks man­aged to stay re­li­gious con­sid­er­ing all their deities seem to be bas­tard­s.

On the oth­er hand, Ba­na as Hec­tor was ok. He has that what the hell am I do­ing here look a char­ac­ter in tragedy would have if he at the same time was aware of what he is do­ing, thinks it´s nuts but can´t stop it, which I think is how any­one would look if the gods forced him to go fight hand to hand against a guy that´s sup­posed to be in­vul­ner­a­ble, while a thou­sand nice archers who are on your side just look.

What dis­tract­ed me most dur­ing the movie is how mod­ern mil­i­tary ideas made the lo­gis­tics of the troy siege in­com­pre­hen­si­ble. For ex­am­ple, the land­ing is like a Delta-­Day: D-­Day with greek­s. Sav­ing Pri­vate Achilles. Any half-not-brain­dead guy would de­cide that maybe it was a bet­ter idea to lad a few kilo­me­ters away in a non-de­fend­ed coast, take over a few farm­s, what­ev­er. But no, they land smack in front of Troy. The boats are rammed in­to the beach. You know what that does to a flat-bot­tom greek boat? (I am as­sum­ing they were flat-bot­tomed, or it´s just too stupid).

Those things were pret­ty frag­ile. And if the tide was low, they would flood and sink as soon as it went up.

There is a rea­son why the am­phibi­ous troop trans­port ship was in­vent­ed: you can´t do that with reg­u­lar seago­ing ship­s.

Then they don´t sur­round Troy. So, any Tro­jan that felt like flee­ing could use a sec­ondary gate and walk away from it al­l.

Oh, and just for kick­s, the greek camp is at the bot­tom of a hill.

Not to men­tion massed armies run­ning at each oth­er over hun­dreds of me­ter­s. March­ing was in­vent­ed be­cause if you do that, you are al­ready tired when you get there. And fight­ing with bronze-age sword, spear and shield is a tire­some job!

Ok, I ad­mit that 50000 greeks walk­ing would­n´t be so cin­e­mato­graph­i­cal­ly ex­cit­ing, but hey, I am just whin­ing here.

Oh, and it seems the siege last­ed all of a month. I won­der why the tro­jans did­n*t just sleep through it. Ok, they are sup­posed to be mo­ron­s, with the horse and all that.

But don´t get me wrong, I have seen much worse movies, like re­turn of the lob­ster man or eyes wide shut. It´s just that Homer (or as he is known in Hades, "Spin­ning Guy") wrote a rather fun epic po­em, and it re­al­ly did­n´t need all that much tam­per­ing.