An unexpected break

A poorly-done movie trailer and tepid reviews soured my expectations for the movie Troy, so when friends said they were still determined to go, we went forth grimly. Perhaps lowered expectations were the key to enjoying our first "summer 2004" movie.

From the trailer, we were worried that the dialog would be clumsy. It was actually okay, and moved things along. We were worried that there'd be too much "jiggle-cam" during the fights, preventing any greater conceptualization of what was going on. There was blessedly little of that. I kept thinking that Brad Pitt would be a lousy hero. He turned out to be a fine warrior, and his pretty-boy looks merely underscored his "touched by the gods" origins.

Your anchors for the movie in terms of gripping, well-played characters: (a) Peter O'Toole as King Priam, (b) Sean Bean as Odysseus, and especially (c) Eric Bana as Hector.

Some minor gripes:

• The sun kept coming up in the morning over the ocean, i.e. west. This is assuming that Troy is in fact in the East and the Greeks came from the West, as the opening map of the Mediterranean indicated. The moon, for its part, seems to hang around whereever it dang well pleases -- including on the northern horizon.
  
• Achilles sure does a lot of moping around. Worse than a Beverly Hills teenager, except he might actually kill you if you don't give him the keys to the chariot.
  
• The "humming/moaning woman on the soundtrack," made prominent in Gladiator, gets overused in this movie. The device gets downright distracting at times.
  
• The special effects guys didn't seem to put much thought into how they'd render the invasion fleet on their computers. The processor-perfect inter-boat spacing as far as the eye could perceive came off as more fake than a fuzzy matte still would have been.