Most literate individuals hold some grasp on Homer's "Odyssey", as it was probably jammed down their throat in literature courses. This weighted pressure of a genius' work on students is both a travesty and a blessing since Homer's lyrical presence is so unparalleled, yet not a narrative style to be forced. But what about Homer's arguably superior work, "The Iliad", and the epic tale of Troy continued through Vergil's "The Aeneid"? To bring an expensive version of this magnificent narrative to the big screen begs for greatness. At the same time, is it really possible, or necessary, to cram all of its literary nuances into film form?
That's the daunting task that Wolfgang Petersen, director of Das Boot and The Neverending Story, attempted to take on with his 2004 summertime confection, Troy. The costumes, acting, action, and other tangibles were all in line for big-budget consumption. But, there was something missing. In fact, there was a plethora of elements missing that made the "flick" nowhere near as adherent as the ancient tale in comparison. Most importantly, a lot of the decisions made when filtering the film in the final product stage really sucked the essence of Homer's poem out. The film did well at the box office as a May to August thrill ride, but lacked in lasting appeal.
Now, Petersen has given his epic film another crack in a director's cut of Troy. With "30 Minutes of Never Before Seen Footage", Troy is longer, bloodier, and much more sprawling in scope. More importantly, it recovers the stolen spirit lost in the theatrical cut. In short, Troy: The Director's Cut, though still not the perfect marriage between Homer and the cinema screen, stands strong as a more enthralling and sweeping epic that easily trumps its predecessor.
The Film:
Left = Theatrical, Right = Director's Cut
Note: Not exact frames.
Greed. Power. Love. Fame. Honor.
The story of Troy is one of multiple layers and motivations, but most of the conflict lies within the Greek conqueror Agamemnon (Brian Cox) and his gallant champion Achilles (Brad Pitt). Agamemnon leads his army across the world for global domination, needing nothing more than a hint of desire to march upon a country. His bickering relationship with the egotistical Achilles still pans out as success within the battles, purely because of Achilles' bloodlust for fame flowing through his half-deity body. The want, the desire, and the greed soaked with conquest are what brings a brutal war upon themselves.
Amorous motives within the eyes and arms of Paris of Troy (Orlando Bloom) and Helen of Sparta (Diane Kruger), however, are our catalysts. While on a peace mission for Troy, both Trojan princes Hector (Eric Bana) and Paris work as liaisons to their King Priam (Peter O' Toole) to assemble a relationship with the Spartan king Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), husband to Helen. What they didn't plan on was the growing love that blossomed between Paris and Helen into a sordid affair. After their efforts lead to success and the Trojans sail home, Paris reveals his cataclysmic decision to bring the beautiful Helen to Troy. Once Menelaus discovers her departure, he retreads to his brother, none other than Agamemnon, to storm Troy in an effort to bring her back. Agamemnon, not caring one way or another about Helen, accepts this opportunity to violently take Troy and add the city to his collection. Without Achilles and his band of loyal warriors, however, Agamemnon will not succeed.
Ultimately, our focus trails towards both the mounting war and Achilles. After a little coercion from Odysseus (Sean Bean), he starts to contemplate whether or not to fight for Agamemnon any longer. When he goes to his mother, the water goddess Thetis (Julie Christie), for counsel, she instead bequeaths something akin to a prophecy upon him. If Achilles decides not to venture forth into Troy, he'll live a pleasant life without everlasting fame. However, if he goes to Troy and engages in the battle, he will achieve such vast greatness that his name will be remembered forever. The choice lying before Achilles encompasses the eternal division between immortal fame and a quiet, pleasant existence.
As epic narratives go, "The Iliad" holds everything you could possibly want within a phenomenal story. Heroic battles, great character relations, and terse motives pump with full enthralling adrenaline within the pages of Homer's poem. Furthermore, its brutality begs for gore-hungry buffs to consume every ounce of crackling bones and dramatic impaling. When you look at the components, "The Iliad" sounds like it could translate phenomenally to film. But is it possible to make such sprawling narrative rich with undertones and context come to life flawlessly? Wolfgang Petersen attempted this with Troy, as well as cramming in some of Vergil's "The Aeneid" for good measure in telling the complete story. With an enormous budget and incredible talent, he pieced together a lush film packed with bombast and adrenaline. It was attractive and marginally entertaining, but fairly unsatisfying. What it lacked was the source material's raw essence.
Theatrical Cut vs. Director's Cut:
At times, systematic rundowns of additions and subtractions for certain films' alternate cuts wiggle into reviews. This has grown exceedingly difficult with recent large scale epic re-imaginations and, in my humblest opinion, detract from these fresh experiences. These lists can be useful for smaller reformulations, but not for completely different "events". As is the case for Petersen's new cut of Troy. In short, this Troy waves a much more epic, sexy, brutal, and beautiful flag that heartily grabs your attention. Above all else, it flexes strength far beyond its theatrical counterpart. You won't need a list of scene-by-scene alterations to guide you through this.
Petersen has jumped back into Troy with his hair down, packing a desire for an expansive and beautiful picture without the constraints for a marketable film. After a second screening of the theatrical film taken directly before viewing this cut, I felt the same hollowness that I felt with my first time through. As a casual lover of Homer's literature, I couldn't shake the feeling that the film didn't do the narrative the slightest bit of justice. It was a loud sword-and-sandals picture that skimmed the cream from the top of an incredible story. Costumes, casting, cinematography ... Troy, as a whole, was very pretty with an outstanding, underused cornucopia of actors. Alas, Troy disappointed me, basically because I saw what loomed underneath its depths. It felt like a gorgeous, capable bird with clipped wings.
For starters, don't be fooled by the "Unrated: 30 Minutes" moniker plastered on the cover of this new edition. There is much more unseen and unheard in Troy than you'd expect. Sure, the film spans over 190+ minutes, nearly 40 minutes longer than the public cut. You'll recognize the difference with the very first shot of a trotting dog scurrying across the outskirts of the battlefield. We're working with new material, and I'll address that in a moment.
Sound and Image:
First, Troy is going to look and sound a great deal different than you'll remember. As you can imagine, slapping an extra 30+ minutes into the film cries out for seamless alterations with the musical accompaniment. Thankfully, a new score has been formulated for this director's cut. One of my problems with the flow of the theatrical edition was the brusque yet gratingly bland music accompanying a lot of the scenes, especially with the key one-on-one battle in the film. We're working with a newly engineered score here that holds a quieter, more sweeping flare. There's a lot of intricate beauty within this new track, filled with identifiable nuances and gentle eccentricities. It's incredible how the demeanor of a film can shift purely due to a change in music. This cut boasts a strong complimentary effect with its proportionate score, especially when it stretches a once obnoxiously loud film into a leaner, more beautiful work. But the new beauty in the film aesthetics doesn't stop with the music.
Update - Here's a side note after some further aided discovery: A lot of Horner's original score remains within this track; however, it has be drastically re-edited and formulated to better accompany the demeanor of the film. A couple of tracks have been included that appear in different films, as has one of Gabriel Yared's original song elements in the form of vocal accompaniment with a funeral sequence (discovered to be "Mourning Women" after a little digging). It's interesting; while listening to the track, it holds such a full and sumptuous persona that it doesn't feel that close to the same accompaniment. Some of the particulars felt reminiscent of the original music, but it undoubtedly holds a vastly different attitude.
The prior note about the "Additional Music" has been removed.
When you take a look at the negative across the film, you'll notice that the overall presence of the film's core remains intact. You'll recognize a lot of the photography, but something will seem different. Troy has received a boost in color. Whether this injection of hues leans closer to the theatrical negative or enhanced for visualization purposes, I can't be certain. What is clear is that Troy looks absolutely astounding, especially within this fully saturated blue and tan palette. What was once an echoed, bland azure within water now starkly shines with turquoise splendor. Glistening gold statues in the sunlight aren't a dull tinge, but more like the awe-inspiring nuggets that we'd come to expect from ancient gold. This color shift gives Petersen's new film a large boost with something it was missing: a fantastical, whimsical demeanor that the epic story of Troy should have.
Something else will come across differently with the visuals. You'll notice that the editing seems marginally altered, with a few items rearranged. Some of those minor tweaks really aid in Troy's new poise. They give slight, tinkering changes to the demeanor of our characters. Here's an example: As Achilles and Briseis sit in his tent conversing at their first meeting, one of his soldiers walks in to have a word with him. In the theatrical cut, there was a sloppy cut straight onto the soldier's face. In this expanded edition, we don't leave Achilles and Briseis' sight, continually focusing on their demeanor while his head pops in and out. It's slight, but it gives an added dash of personality and focus we need in this film.
Petersen has also taken his focused lens and stepped back a few notches in several sequences to infuse more of the, well, Greco-Roman spirit to his film. Put bluntly, there's a speckle or two of nudity, both male and female (though nothing offensive), in this cut that are present yet unseen in the theatrical cut. Aside from adding the implicit sex appeal to these scenes, it also gives us more of the zest that an ancient era film should have. Across literature and antiquities, the male and female form is explicitly displayed around the Grecian and Roman eras. Troy harnesses just a shade more of that persona this time around.
New Material:
But let's nudge sound, color, and skin aside here for a moment, because that's not exactly what draws people towards a fuller cut of a film. How, in full context, is the new content in Petersen's director's cut of Troy compared to the theatrical cut? In a word, seamless. Though it doesn't change any relationships or alter any conclusions, the new material rapidly replenishes the film's vacant attitude in sweeping fashion. From the first shots of a dog running to find his master on the outskirts of a battlefield to the added helping of Odysseus' back-story, we're given some new enticing glimmers that slap a lot more meat on the bones. We see more of Paris and Helen's relationship, as well as Hector's intervention against Paris for such an activity. At times, it's easy to forget that Helen is, in essence, the cause of the Battle for Troy. The focus still leans too far on the physical war instead of the novel's even-keeled focus on battle, love, and a fame-hungry warrior's growth. However, with these added dashes, it harnesses the essence of the narrative and the time period with a much tighter and enjoyable grasp.
One of the arguments about Troy's problematic disagreement with "The Iliad" is that the book holds a much bloodier and brutal tone. Rest assured, this discrepancy has also been taken into account. Care for a dish of dismemberment, impalement, puncture, blood, guts, gore, and all-around fiery battle frenzy with the adapted story of Troy? Then this cut is for you, because you'll be pleasantly surprised at how brutal Petersen's new cut is in comparison. There's several added sequence featuring Ajax, a downplayed character in the film with a more prominent part in the book. His barbarity in the film only piqued a few times in the theatrical cut, whereas in this cut he's a fierce machine who gets nearly as much accomplished on the battlefield as Achilles. Where the battle in Troy felt like generic summer blockbuster fare almost worthy of a nap, these new additions to the battles are packed with tense grandiose that'll really suck you in.
Troy's theatrical cut lacked one other thing in particular that it desperately needed: narcissism. This is the one, and probably the only, time you'll hear these words pour onto one of my reviews. Narcissism is required for the hubris of these warriors, not just Agamemnon. And, with this new, expansive cut of Troy, hubris, especially within Achilles, oozes forth with more exuberance than the original cut. I had stringent problems comparing the strength and heartlessness of Achilles in the film to Achilles in the book. He seemed soft, tangibly soft, in the original cinematic version. With a little work in the editing room that includes a few small alterations and expansive stretches, Achilles feels more heartless, egotistical, and rugged. At the start, Pitt's casting as Achilles irked me something fierce. With Petersen's first go in the theatrical attempt, I was proved wrong in aesthetics and persona. His fervency has been tinkered and tooled with in the director's edition, and Achilles feels more like the engulfing menace and boastful anti-hero that we would come to expect from the pages of "The Iliad". However, the film still retreads heavily from emphasizing Achilles' fiery rage. He's not perfect, still boasting a bit more heart than I'd like to see from Achilles, but is a bit more adherent and gritty during his "humanization" in the book than before.
Impressions on the Director's Cut:
You might be thinking to yourself: Color saturation? Nudity? Guts? Is all this exploitative excess packed in with a few extra scenes under a Director's Cut label just to sucker me into a purchase? The answer is no, even though it might seem that way. This material isn't simply slapped into the cut for the sheer delight in selling discs for a little "unrated" action. Instead, these choices grandly transform Troy into more of the epic, battle-worn tale that a Greco-Roman story of Troy should be. The added gravitas pumps the film full of personality, one which the initial cut lacked.
There's still a few aching problems with Troy, even with these grand changes. It's reasonable to assume that some thematic liberties need to be taken to make a story more "cinematic". However, there's a difference between shifting dynamics for on-screen adaption and making underplayed assumptions about the audience's ability to grasp relationships. One effort Petersen uses that could've been dodged is a weak attempt to connect characters by family ties. It seems that everyone has to be everyone else's cousin to share impact within the film. It's an effort to cut corners that works, sort of, but really detracts from the strength of these core relationships. While forgivable, there are a few other corners attempted to be cut that are a little more glaring, such as a lack of emphasis on the Battle of Troy's length. Many sacrifices in accuracy are made for entertainment value in Troy.
Instead of scratching your head over the inconsistencies in the theatrical cut, you're much more willing to accept these quirks in the new cut because it carefully locks us into an unwavering level of entertainment. Amidst these problematic differences, we're working with an end accomplishment that helps us to hold more belief in the story. The length and dialed-down thematic tone make the film quite acceptable as an epic film. It doesn't feel like a shallow distraction specifically thrown together to drink our hard-earned cash on a warm summer's day. Since the film is engineered to be a lot less choppy, it makes Troy much more usurping as a quality film. The same scenes feel quite different when accompanied by the altered score and displayed with some difference in connectivity and visual reformulation.
Overall, Petersen's film no longer feels like someone slashed out massive portions, pumped up the volume, and hit fast forward. Troy: The Director's Cut repairs these broken mistakes and injects the film with some much needed fuel. In comparison to the theatrical cut which, in its blitzed pace, felt every ounce as long as it 160+ minute run time, this new cut's alterations and adjustments make a three-hour film feel more like two. Plus, it's simply a more dramatically and brutally engrossing effort. Troy: The Director's Cut earns back the essence of Homer's narrative that we hoped to see at the start.
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