I headed out to the midnight showing of Troy last night; not a smart move considering the running time (165 minutes). At the risk of giving away the ending, allow me to report the following: Troy gets sacked. Of course, this will doubtless come as a huge surprise to a vast majority of American viewers. Nevertheless, we can all look forward to a few months of listening to people pepper their discourse with allusions to ancient heroes – for the price of a movie ticket you can now exhibit the indicators of a classical education. Which is cool. Of course, Troy cobbles together (and creates from scratch) a wide variety of Trojan War Stories; there's stuff from the Iliad, the Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and some fun stuff on Helen's abduction that's inserted to flesh-out the story.

Now, back in college I studied a little acting. One class I took focused exclusively on ancient Greek drama. We worked on Agamemnon, Medea, and of course the Oedipus trilogy. We studied Michael Cacoyannis' 1977 masterpiece, Iphigenia. We groveled; we screamed; we tore at our clothing and cursed the Gods – wildly idiotic behavior, even for a bunch of hung-over college kids. A lesson I learned during that time is that one of the difficulties of staging Greek tragedy is that the emotions involved are often so extreme and their expression so vehement that contemporary audiences often don’t know what to make of it all; nor, sometimes, do the actors. The makers of Troy have largely solved this problem by not including many large emotional speeches, and by hiring exceptional actors (Brian Cox, Peter O'Toole) to counterbalance the worthless hacks incapable of providing emotional depth (Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger).

At least Brad Pitt, an actor with genuine talent, admits he is somewhat out of his depth. At a publicity junket he made this comment when asked about Peter O'Toole:

[he is] very eloquent and very powerful, and comes from a training that I haven't had, [one] I don't completely understand.

Still, to give him his due, Pitt does a fine job in the film – even though the screenwriters deprived him of dialogue he could really sink his teeth into.

UPDATE: Looking for great acting? Look no further than Eric!