Or, If A One Kills A Zero On The Beaches Of Troy, Does It Leave A Stain?
How did this movie suck? Let me count the ways...
It opened with a belt-and-suspenders approach - three screens of text setting the stage going directly to a voice-over. You can open your movie with either text or a voice-over, although both are a little narratively weak, but to use both is crap.
Why do the Spartan and Grecian Kings (who are brothers) have Scottish Brogues? And look so Anglo?
The directing was leaden. So was the acting.
The dead bodies spread around the horse didn't have the symptoms diagnosed as 'plague'. If anything, they looked like they had anthrax.
Just because the director posseses the technology to multiply the actors on a beach-head doesn't mean he shouldn't just hire more extras.
Did they test screen this in front of anyone? There were so many parts that were laugh-out-loud funny, but not intentionally so. I always laugh at crap movies, but I had much of the audience laughing with me by the end. What had us giggling the most was Brad Pitt screaming 'Hector!' over and over again. He sounded like my alarm clock when I keep hitting snooze.
And for god's sake, we know this is a book! Every few minutes someone took the opportunity to point out how this was going to go down in history as a great battle, etc, etc.
What was with the Moaning Chick Soundtrack? Was that supposed to tell us this was an Epic?
Finally, a friend who accompanied us and who had previously been moved by Orlando Bloom as an elf said that her fantasty life with him had now dried up.
The one thing I did like was the ambiguity left about Achilles's mother - was she really the goddess? Or, in this movie that generally mocks the belief in the Greek gods, was she just a pretty lady selecting sea shells?
Of course, since I've never made a movie, I'm not entitled to criticize, right?
Posted by msouthwo at May 16, 2004 07:06 PM