Eric Bana readies his sword for an onrushing Greek outside the walls of 'Troy.' Troy Starring Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Written by David Benioff, based on Homer's epic poem. Rated R.

Hollywood has made The Trojan War hip again, at least for this week. The real-life 13th-century B.C. conflict inspired Homer's epic poem The Iliad, and from that seminal work sprang thousands of years' worth of creative endeavors -- other epics such as Virgil's derivative but still powerful The Aeneid, plays including Euripides' searing The Trojan Women and Shakespeare's unheroic Troilus and Cressida, and even operas ranging from Berlioz' elephantine Les Troyens to Sir Michael Tippett's philosophical King Priam. Curiously enough, this list includes no great movies or even good ones.

Sadly, Troy does nothing to rectify this. Obviously, the people involved with this film were looking for a project that could incorporate both Gladiator's antiquarian warrior chic and the Lord of the Rings movies' gigantic digitally enhanced battle sequences. There are two problems with this. The first is that director Wolfgang Petersen films the battles haphazardly. Whether the camera is far from the action or in the middle of it, it's hard to tell who's slaughtering who. The tiny figures in the long shots might as well be plastic army men, and up close the actors swing and hack away at one another to little effect. It's so disjointed that the choppy sequences from Gladiator look sinuous by comparison.

The other problem is that the characters never come to life in the hands of screenwriter David Benioff, who did a capable job with Spike Lee's 25th Hour. Classical scholars will no doubt pounce on Benioff's liberal changes to Homer -- several of the Greek higher-ups die way before they're supposed to, and the gods don't intervene or even show up except for a brief appearance by Thetis (Julie Christie). What really damages the film, though, are his attempts at re-creating a high-flown "poetic" style of dialogue that's appropriate to the setting. Almost every conversation has a line like, "This will be the greatest war the world has ever seen," and the grandiosity wears thin quickly. None of the relationships ring true, for all the huffing and puffing done over Paris (Orlando Bloom) and Helen (Diane Kruger), Achilles (Brad Pitt) and Briseis (Rose Byrne), and Hector (Eric Bana) and Andromache (Saffron Burrows, looking alarmingly thin). Nor can Benioff bring any life to the politicking that goes on among the Greeks and Trojans, and his battle speeches are anemic stuff. ("On that shore lies immortality. Take it! It's yours!")

A fine group of actors has little to do except look good -- German actress Kruger is pretty as Helen but in the same way a thousand other magazine covergirls are. Bloom, meanwhile, looks even more feminine than he did in the Lord of the Rings movies, if you can imagine that. When he kisses Kruger, it practically qualifies as girl-on-girl action. Sean Bean does yeoman work as Odysseus, but his understatement gets lost in the huge scope of this film, not to mention the hamminess of other players, such as the normally reliable Brian Cox as Agamemnon. Among the principals, Bana comes closest to giving a complete performance, channeling some of the dark anger that was notably missing from his work in last year's The Hulk.

In the film's defense, it does hit a groove late. The fatal single combat between Achilles and Hector is shot with regard for continuity and shows off the actors' fighting techniques to good advantage. The subsequent scene in which Hector's father Priam (Peter O'Toole) goes to Achilles' tent to beg for his son's corpse also works well, mostly because O'Toole's wide blue eyes are pooling with grief and Pitt looks suitably freaked out by the presence of this magnificent actor, still leonine in his old age and tremendously moving in his sorrow. The Trojan horse sequence soon afterward features a good-looking horse and a huge army running across a plain in total silence during the dead of night.

These scenes, however, don't take place until more than two hours into this 163-minute slog. Before that happens, we're subjected to a few battles wrapped in a whole lot of tedious chitchat about posterity and the glory of Greece. This is an ill omen -- Petersen at his best can be a crackling entertainer (Das Boot, In the Line of Fire), but even when his movies were cheap, dumb, and lacking in any sort of basic respect for the audience (Outbreak, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm), they were never slow or ponderous. Unfortunately, Troy is exactly that. It's too cumbersome to generate any momentum, and as much as it tries to wring emotions out of its battles and religious rites and love scenes, it fails on all counts. It seems only fitting that the movie ends with a long shot of the smoldering ruins of the city of Troy, seeing that all of its considerable resources have ended up in a similar large-scale wreck.

You can reach Kristian Lin at kristian.lin@fwweekly.com.

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