Troy

Troy is an imperfect epic with one transcendent element: Brad Pitt as Achilles. Pitt trained for six months to sculpt a warrior’s physique and learned sword-fighting techniques that he performs with a feline grace unlike anything in modern cinema. His Achilles is arrogant, beautiful, and lethal — a demigod who fights not for king or country but for personal glory and the immortality of his name. The opening duel where Achilles dispatches a giant champion with a single leaping strike sets the tone: this is a movie about the poetry of violence.

Wolfgang Petersen’s staging of the Trojan War’s great battles is genuinely impressive. The beach assault on Troy — thousands of ships, tens of thousands of warriors, Achilles’s Myrmidons cutting through defenders like a hot blade — is the best ancient battle sequence outside of Gladiator. Eric Bana’s Hector is the film’s moral center, a man fighting not for glory but for family, and his final duel with Achilles is tragic and beautifully choreographed.

The film’s critics point to wooden dialogue and Orlando Bloom’s limp Paris, and they’re not wrong. But Troy earned $497 million worldwide because its action delivers, Brad Pitt’s performance is magnetic, and the Hector-Achilles duel is one of the great one-on-one fights in cinema history.