Rediscovering ‘Troy’: Why Brad Pitt’s Epic Deserves a Second Look Before Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey

For many years, the 2004 film Troy seemed to fit the mold of what film critic Nathan Rabin, a contributor to Decider, describes as a “forgotbuster.” This term refers to movies that perform well at the box office but fail to leave a lasting cultural impact. During the thriving summer box office periods over the past few decades, particularly before the pandemic disrupted the industry, numerous films fell into this category. With an abundance of movies grossing $100 million or more in North America each summer, not all could attain the enduring popularity of a Christopher Nolan film.

Interestingly, the buzz surrounding Nolan’s projects can sometimes resurrect interest in these “forgotbusters.” This is the case with Troy, a historical epic that ranked as the sixth highest-grossing film of summer 2004. The renewed interest is due to Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, slated for a July release. Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, a streamlined version of Homer’s The Iliad, was the last major Homer-inspired film to secure a high-profile summer release.

Back in 2004, Troy held several noteworthy distinctions. It was a significant box office triumph, largely driven by Brad Pitt’s star power. While the cast included other well-known actors such as Eric Bana, Brian Cox, Diane Kruger, Orlando Bloom, Rose Byrne, Peter O’Toole, and Julie Christie, the film was primarily marketed around Pitt, who was then at the peak of his career, a decade after his breakout year in 1994. Troy became his highest-grossing film globally at the time, only later surpassed by titles like F1 and World War Z. Additionally, the film accomplished the rare feat of outperforming the much-anticipated first-weekend-of-May release, a trend observed when Hugh Jackman’s movies like Van Helsing in 2004 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009 did not meet expectations. Alongside 300, Troy was one of the most successful sword-and-sandal epics following the triumph of Gladiator, though it didn’t match the latter in financial, critical, or award success.

However, 300, with its exaggerated comic-book style and hyper-masculine energy, inspired a series of fantastical historical action movies such as Immortals and Gods of Egypt. Troy, on the other hand, did not spark a similar trend, despite the release of a more extended and explicit director’s cut. Moreover, while movie quotes can often be overemphasized, it’s notable that lines from 300 are far more frequently quoted than Pitt’s Achilles shouting, “Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!”

Fifteen years later, Brad Pitt has achieved a form of cinematic immortality, though he has expressed mixed feelings about his role in Troy. He shared these sentiments in a comprehensive interview with New York Times Magazine, reflecting on his career and the impact of his work in the film.

“I had to do Troy because I pulled out of another movie and then had to do something for the studio. It wasn’t painful, but I realized that the way that movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be. I made my own mistakes in it… I could not get out of the middle of the frame. It was driving me crazy. I’d become spoiled working with David Fincher. It’s no slight on Wolfgang Petersen. But somewhere in it, Troy became a commercial kind of thing. Every shot was like, Here’s the hero! There was no mystery. So about that time I made a decision that I was only going to invest in quality stories, for lack of a better term. It was a distinct shift that led to the next decade of films.”

Makes you wonder what he thought of the “mystery” in his largely uncomplicated F1 best-of-the-best character. But that middle-of-the-frame quality also speaks to the appeal of Troy. As much as it de-mystifies the Homer text – this version has no participation from the gods, who are mentioned only as unseen abstractions, not actual characters – it adheres to other, more Hollywood traditions of the lavish mega-production: Lots of stars, sets, locations, costumes, and old-fashioned craft. There’s also plenty of digital trickery, too, of course; Troy is one of those cusp-y movies that seemed pretty effects-saturated at the time but now, having been shot on location using celluloid, has baseline levels of grain and gravity that make it look like a “real” movie.

Maybe that’s why it’s being held up as a kind of platonic ideal of the movie Nolan is trying to make – even though Nolan is hardly overinvested in contemporary digital trickery. (The Odyssey is one of the summer’s few films to be shot entirely on celluloid – in fact, it’s the first Hollywood feature ever made entirely with IMAX cameras.) Troy has gotten mixed into a weird online debate about the “accuracy” of The Odyssey (which, to be clear, is an adaptation of an epic poem that does include the Greek gods, as well as a cyclops, sirens, and other otherworldly elements) – specifically the alleged casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy (played by Diane Kruger in Troy) and Elliot Page as an underworld-dwelling version of Achilles (Pitt’s character in Troy).

The latter is pure speculation; Page may not be playing Achilles at all, but another character who Odysseus encounters in the underworld. Regardless, some of the online controversy has treated this as a reboot/recast version, as if Achilles has been canonically Pitt for centuries, and to deviate from the world’s most handsome movie star from 22 years ago is akin to maliciously ripping up the original text and scattering it to the wind. (You will not be surprised to learn that this argument has found kinship with those repulsed by the mere idea of a Black woman playing Helen, the face who launched a thousand ships.) Even with the charitable reading of “accuracy” interpreted as fidelity to the source, Troy is not especially “accurate” to The Iliad. Pitt just looks like plenty of people’s idea of a god-kissed warrior. In that sense, it’s one of his most iconic performances, without being especially good. That old interview is right: The decade of Pitt performances that followed, for filmmakers like Andrew Dominik, the Coen Brothers, Terrence Malick, and David Fincher, are a lot more interesting.

The Odyssey may fall closer in line with those later Pitt films than with Troy. Then again, Nolan himself was once in the running to direct Troy back in the day, while director Wolfgang Petersen was set to make a version of a Batman/Superman movie that never happened in that form. Petersen jumped back to Troy, a project he had developed earlier, and Nolan was given the opportunity to make Batman Begins. Meanwhile, future Batman v. Superman director Zack Snyder broke out a few years later with 300. That’s all to say that many filmmakers share an interest in comic book heroes and Greek mythology, which makes sense; they’re all attempting to bring both emotional grounding and visual grandeur to these larger-than-life characters.

In that department, Troy is a modest success, more or less deserving of its also-ran status. It’s not as emotionally stirring or exciting as Gladiator or as visually memorable as something as ridiculous as 300 or Gods of Egypt. Apart from the sheer beauty of its faces and bodies, it’s kind of forgettable, and an odd movie to hold up to The Odyssey at all. That its current streaming home is AMC+, a vestige of an old cable network, feels right: It feels made for an overextended four-and-a-half-hour timeslot on Sunday afternoon cable, a laundry movie from a pre-streaming age. Of course the Nolan version isn’t going to look or feel much like this, nor can it afford to be “only” a Troy-sized hit. There will still be hit movies consigned to semi-obscurity in the movie, but the era of Peak Forgotbuster is over.

Stream Troy on AMC+