TROY (2004) - Arrow Video

Troy
Disc Releasing Company

Original Release Date May 14th, 2004
Written by David Benioff, based on The Iliad by Homer
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
Starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Brian Cox, Brendan Gleeson
Language English

Purchase your copy HERE from Arrow

by "Doc" Hunter Bush,
MovieJawn Staff Writer & Podcast Director, cohost of the Hate Watch/Great Watch Podcast

The Movie: Good

Before there was The Odyssey, there was Troy. No, seriously. This is true on multiple metrics; not only was Troy (screenplay by Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff) released to theaters over twenty years earlier than Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, but it's based on The Iliad by Homer, which follows Achilles (played here by Brad Pitt) and thousands of other Greeks as they arrive on the beaches of the city of Troy and wage the Trojan War. The Odyssey, meanwhile, is the story of Odysseus as he and many others attempt to return home from the war.

As a film, Troy is incredibly solid. I watched approximately six hours of Troy across two successive days (the 2 hour & 43 minute Theatrical Cut one day and the 3 hour & 15 minute Director's Cut the other) and I was actually never bored. And that's not including the bonus features! The story moves well, manages to balance a great number of characters and their interests, all while holding MY interest. It doesn't hurt that the thing looks fantastic.

Director Wolfgang Petersen had previously passed on making Gladiator (2000), but upon seeing the popularity, critical acclaim, and awards that production had accrued, longed to make his own sword & sandals epic and then just a few years later, here comes Troy. Peterson (and crew) really deliver on the epic scale of what is, really, a very personal story. When all's said and done, the Trojan War happened because one of the princes of Troy, Paris (Orlando Bloom) is beefing with Greek king Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) over a girl, Menelaus' deeply unhappy and unsatisfied wife, Helen (Diane Kruger). So Menelaus gets his brother and fellow king Agamemnon (Brian Cox) to rally a thousand ships' worth of Greek soldiers to make it everybody's problem.

Almost everyone in the cast is great, as well. Cox and Gleeson, of course, but also Bloom who I am not usually very hype about, Eric Bana as Paris' brother Hector, Peter O'Toole as their father Priam, and Sean Bean as the aforementioned Odysseus! The only person who I wasn't at all vibing with here, weirdly, is Brad Pitt; an actor I usually enjoy. He just feels very flat to me throughout. Diane Kruger (in her breakout role!) is a little underserved, considering she is essentially the inciting incident, but otherwise I found the writing to effectively be doings its job.

Troy is really well-made, and entertaining, even across multiple viewings, but having now mainlined roughly a full 8-hour work-day's worth of it, I can't imagine having much of a desire to watch it any time soon. But should that desire ever rear it's head, the Arrow release has got my back!

The Audio + Video: Excellent

I legitimately loved the look of Troy. It's a very warm-toned film, visually, with all the beaches, the deep armor and bronzed skin of the numerous warriors, but the sky is always a beautiful azure blue, the greenery within the city of Troy is always vibrant and verdant, and overall the color balance is just excellent. A few scenes are a bit on the dimly lit side of things for me, but it never ends up in Too Dark To See territory. I never once thought about or noticed any real film grain issues, and as I frequently say: it's only an issue if it's distracting.

Similarly, I found the music to be well-balanced, even when I wasn't enjoying it. There is a lot of thematically-appropriate sounding instrumentation in both scores for Troy (more on that in a second) but for my money, James Horner's score (which accompanies the Theatrical Cut) sounds too "American Action Movie" to me. On the other hand, original composer Gabriel Yared's score (included with the Director's Cut) has an appropriately eclectic sound, with movements that evoked a more "Greek Epic" feel, for me. Regardless which one you prefer, the audio package treats them both very well. I will mention that some other music cues (including one from Gladiator, if I remember correctly) are used to fill out the Director's Cut, which caught me off guard from time to time.

Special Features: Excellent

There are a LOT of bonus features, mostly archival, which I mention only so that you are prepared for the gloriously early-2000s computer generated menu animations and transitions included in some of them. So obviously, if you're a Troy completist and already own whatever previous release(s) these originated from, you won't be getting much new content, but if this is your first go-round with owning the flick, you're gonna have a lot of stuff to sort through. There's about an hour and a half, all told, and that's not including the picture-in-picture commentary "In Movie Experience", which, in the interest of transparency, I will say that I haven't checked out yet.

My favorite aspect of Troy are the battle sequences. They're enormous! Watching them, I was genuinely curious as to how much of the armies onscreen could possibly have been real and how much was digital crowd expansion (a tactic that had been around for some time, but had really reached new heights with Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in 2002). Luckily, the bonus features disc is quite expansive on the topics of both the effects AND the battle scenes. It's obviously a mixture of both, but the process shown in the various featurettes is actually really interesting.

• In Movie Experience
• Troy in Focus (13 discrete features) (23:09)
• In the Thick of Battle (17:14)
• From Ruins to Reality (14:03)
• Troy: An Effects Odyssey (10:55)
• Attacking Troy (15:12)
• Gallery of the Gods (12 discrete bios of Greek gods) (10:50)
• Theatrical Trailer (2:08)
• Image Galleries

In Summary: Buy it on sale

Are you a Greek history / myth super fan? Or a scholar of historical warfare? If so, I would honestly recommend Troy pretty strongly. As a borderline fantasy epic (the film tones down the presence of the gods, and attempts to make Achilles' nigh-invulnerability feel more realistic) Troy succeeds, and is chockablock with great small moments and performances, but Brad Pitt feels weirdly unengaged and that makes it hard for me to care about the main character.

The film also does a really cheap bait-and-switch involving Garrett Hedlund as Achilles' "cousin" Patrroclus, which I haven't mentioned because it's a pretty big spoiler (yes, for a film that's over twenty years old, and based on a book that is thousands of years old), but I just do not enjoy being so obviously hoodwinked. This is a relatively minor complaint however, obviously. If you are considering a blind buy, I would still recommend checking it out overall. 

"The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)"

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This was written for Shit Movie Fest for their 25 Days of Shitmas.
It appears here pretty much exactly as it does there.
But why not be cool and direct a little web traffic their way?
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Y'know how it is post-Halloween: maybe you only sort of feel like watching a Christmas movie, but don't wanna get all "TBS 24-Hour A Christmas Story Marathon" with it quite yet; you only wanna dip your toe into all the tinsel and twinkle lights. A lot of people would go Die Hard, some would go Gremlins, everybody's got a favorite. Mine? The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), an overlooked gem of the the alt-Christmas movie season.

This movie comes from writer Shane Black who 1) always sets things around Christmastime, 2) always has snappy dialogue and 3) I thought for a LONG time had written Die Hard because of reasons 1 & 2. What he actually wrote was Lethal Weapon which is totally set around Christmas and has snappy dialogue. The director, Renny Harlin had directed the second Die Hard and was at the time married to Long Kiss Goodnight star / my celebrity crush Geena Davis. Black's and Harlin's names show up at the end of the opening credits over shots of Christmas ornaments and a grenade respectively. There's such a perfect, if very specific, duality to those two images that I'm honestly surprised Shane Black has never had anyone armed with weaponized Christmas ornaments before (he may have). SPOILERS: there is a group* of carolers that are not quite weaponized exactly, but used as a Trojan Horse.

* If there isn't already a collective noun for carolers, might I suggest a scarf? It just sounds right, y'know? "Oh, honey look. There's a scarf of carolers outside!" Merry Christmas, English.


SPOILERS from here on out, if you care.


Long Kiss Goodnight follows Geena (Miss Davis if you're nasty) as school teacher Samantha Caine, living a Norman Rockwell life in upstate Pennsylvania with a fiancé, a daughter and no memories from before 8 years ago. Her opening voiceover tells us that she has, over time, stopped hiring the expensive private investigators and has moved down to the cheap ones, and has all but completely given up on finding the woman she used to be. She has "kissed her goodnight". Except what kind of movie would that be?

Three things happen to Caine all at once: she's Mrs. Claus in the town's Christmas parade (the first spoken line of dialogue is a teenage boy bystander yelling "Mrs. Claus is hot!"), she gets into a car accident which shakes loose some of her old personality and a pre-amnesia credit card turns up, leading one of Caine's aforementioned cheaper detectives to show up at her home. This detective is Samuel L. Jackson as Mitch Henessey, scene stealer.

Caine's Mrs. Claus ends up on the local news where she's seen by One Eyed Jack (Joseph McKenna) a hitman doing time in New Jersey who shows up at Caine's home, using that Trojan scarf to launch us into the film's first big action scene (unless you count chopping vegetables with intense skill as an action scene. I watch a lot of Food Network, so I do not). The action in this movie is great. Renny Harlin really does action well: focused, bombastic and stylish. At the scene's end Jack is dead, Henessey has arrived and Caine can't continue to pretend nothing's up.

Now, I'm not going to go beat-by-beat with you for this movie. I totally COULD, but if you haven't seen it, I'd really be doing it a disservice. You should see this for yourself. Again, Renny Harlin knows his way around action sequences and this movie has the type of action you don't see as much anymore: memorable.

With computer generated effects becoming more and more common, the tendency is to make everything huge; a spectacle, because there aren't the limitations that there are with practical effects-driven action. There is definitely an appeal there, but something as simple as Geena Davis ice-skating across a frozen pond, shooting at a car full of bad guys has stuck with me since I was a kid. A big part of that is the way these scenes and set pieces are executed, but obviously Shane Black can write. Besides the action, the dialogue in Long Kiss is incredibly great. Very quotable, especially Henessey, but early in the film Caine has a few quips that feel like extra Riggs dialogue left over from the first Lethal Weapon.

One thing I want to cover briefly is Brian Cox, always a welcome addition to any movie! Earlier, when I referred to Mitch Henessey as a scene stealer? That's still true, but Cox's Dr. Waldman steals the show. Back when Samantha Caine was a covert government agent named Charly Baltimore, Dr. Waldman was her handler. There is a moment when Waldman is describing a notably phallic doodle of Henessey's, and he holds it up so the audience can see it. It definitely does kind of look like genitalia. Henessey quips "That's a duck, not a dick." and your eyes go back to look again, and Waldman does too! Brian Cox always makes these little acting choices and that's one that really clicked with me and has made me laugh since I was a kid.

On the topic of kids, parenthood is a definite through-line in this movie. Charly Baltimore's rejection of Caitlin as being Samantha Caine's daughter and not hers is an emotional thematic reminder of the changes this character is going through. She doesn't just cut & dye her hair and start smoking (not to mention shooting people), she is denying a piece of who she is. "Sam Caine had to come from somewhere" Henessey tells her, "I think you just forgot to hate yourself for a while". Henessey too has issues with a son he's barely allowed to interact with, but clearly wishes things were different; "I've never done one thing right in my life. That takes skill".

Speaking of parenthood, I might as well mention that my mom loves this movie (she has very good taste). When I told her I was gonna be writing about it for Shitmas 2016, she was very excited. "I remember the soundtrack as being right on!" she told me. Her favorite bit comes near the finale: Geena Davis' Caine/Baltimore (it's hard to say which personality is running the show by this point) has been beaten up, blown up, shot, stabbed, I dunno... maybe poked in the eye? She's been through the ringer physically and emotionally and when she pulls daughter Caitlin out of the spot she's been hiding in, Caitlin whines "Mommy, I hit my head..."

This makes my mother laugh. Every time. Just does.

I could go on about Long Kiss Goodnight being ahead of its time with regards to female action stars (straight action, non-genre), how Sam Caine / Charly Baltimore is Jason Bourne before Jason Bourne (or before the films brought him to a wider public awareness anyway), or even about how David Morse is in it (David Morse is in it!) but I'll just urge you to watch it this holiday season and see what you think.