Looking up Troy’s cast, and it was really loaded. Wow.

You could do worse than TROY: it’s not perfect, but there’s a good deal to recommend it as an Action Movie and it’s graced with some fine performances, as well as one outstandingly delicious hammy one.

Not a perfect movie, but quite an entertaining epic of the Old School (and you may be interested to observe the tonal differences between it and THE ODYSSEY, despite proceeding from surprisingly similar assumptions).

It’s only fair to mention that this film left me with a little bit of a crush on Ms Diane Kruger, despite strong competition from Ms Saffron Burrows and even stronger competition from Ms Rose Byrne.

My favorite Zendaya performance is probably Challengers where she gets to antagonize men so I think you might be onto something.

Never seen Troy but the success of The Odyssey and the interesting behind the scenes connections to it (Nolan was at one point lined up to direct Troy before he went to Batman) made me curious. I was rewatching some Pitt scenes from Babylon and it just made me want to watch another Brad Pitt movie haha.

Oh dang. Going to change that wording. I event thought through his movies and somehow skipped over The Prestige despite it being one of my favs of his.

“Our age of bronze is collapsing” is such a Chris Nolan dumb-smart line. You couldn’t have cooked it up in a lab better.

I have your review open in a tab but haven’t read through it yet.

Thanks, Thrash, I think I’m with you on your take on Nolan’s not-quite-perfect intellectualism. I’ve been calling it “quasi-cerebral” because it makes you think but I’m not sure it always is that smart. I really like your idea that the fact that he makes you feel smart is a big part of the appeal, like it gives everyone something to chew on, and that his biggest strengths are in production and spectacle.

Thanks Eli. I think that’s a good insight that certain aspects of the Odyssey text remain always relevant; I think it’s not too much of a stretch to see the island hopping as mirroring sometihng like colonial pillaging of resources.

Thanks Mitch; you are very generous. You knew I had to address the question of whether Nolan is one of our great writers after the Discord debate on the matter.

*It actually struck me today that Zendaya might be more my image of Hera than Athena – I suspect she’d have far more fun chewing into a Queenly, antagonistic role than the more cerebral, ambivalent Athena of this film.

Also, this film gets Argus right and that poor, wretched, beloved dog has been pouring out the tears for the better part of three millennia with no sign of quitting yet because we love him for being the Best Boy.

Also, it’s fascinating that while their plots completely fail to mesh this film and the Wolfgang Petersen TROY work strangely well as a double feature (But then I have a terrible weakness for the latter film, which undoubtedly has my favourite depiction of Achilles in action**).

**It’s part of the evidence for my Rule of Cinema that the scarier a Mother****** a Brad Pitt character gets to be, the better the film.

Well, *technically*… but the 1890s are close enough.

Cosigned on it feeling not unlike an dour and hyper-expensive Holy Grail, though, and I could almost imagine Nolan wishing he could also end the movie with somebody showing up to arrest Odysseus. I’ve said it elsewhere, but I’m still really perplexed that the tradition of Odysseus attempting to dodge the Trojan draft, the most important piece of non-Odyssey material and possibly just the most important piece of material period coloring our modern understanding of the character, isn’t in this movie where the whole point is that the Trojan War was a crime and Odysseus sucks for being a crucial part of the system that committed it. Also, “our Age of Bronze is collapsing” is the worst line in a movie I’ve heard in years.

But yeah, still works, and as a collection of great scenes along with less-great scenes or less-great parts of great scenes it can still, uh, sing.

I’ve been reflecting about the appeal of Christopher Nolan as a director, and I have a back-of-a-napkin theory. His movies are popular, not because he’s a genius, but because… well… he *isn’t.*

He’s undoubtedly a very smart guy, and a very talented director, who takes on enormously ambitious projects and mostly sticks the landing. But “mostly” is the operative word. He makes films that feel smart while you watch them, but on the drive back home, you have questions. There’s clumsiness and imperfection when you look past the spectacle; the kind of imperfections you or I might make if we helmed a $250 million project.

I think that’s catnip to movie fans. His product is 95% pure, but that missing 5% makes it approachable in a way that a film can’t be if it’s inscrutably perfect. When everyone’s a critic, they’ll turn up in droves for a movie that will let them formulate criticisms.