Troy: 5 Reasons Why It's Worth A Re-Visit

1. The Director€™s Cut Is Vastly Superior

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxRr2d7tR7A I won't go claiming that it's as much of an improvement over the theatrical version as the director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven, but Petersen's second cut of Troy is still a superior film to the original on pretty much every level. There's about 30 minutes of extra footage: battle scenes are extended and shown to be more graphic and bloody, and there's considerably more footage of the actual sacking of Troy, barely seen in the original cut. There are plenty of new scenes, most notably a humorous introduction to Odysseus on Ithaca which delightfully nods to the events of the Odyssey. A lot more detail is given to the city itself, showing us how it operates in peacetime and as it prepares for war, thus allowing us to sympathise more with its inhabitants once the fighting commences.

And it's not all about what's added but also what's taken out: the ghastly scene in which Helen tends to Paris' wound following his duel with Menelaus with its cringeworthy dialogue about cowardice and courage is mercifully removed. Aside from this, and permit me this slight instance of male chauvinism, their love scene is reframed to include more actual nudity of Diane Kruger. Come on, there are already dozens of male chests on display as it is....

The film's musical score is also given a huge overhaul. To give a brief re-cap, composer Gabriel Yared originally worked on Troy's score for over a year before being removed from the project shortly before the film's theatrical release after test audiences supposedly found it too old-fashioned. In came James Horner, he of self-plagiarising fame, who impressively wrote a replacement score within four weeks, but one that sounded rushed and predictably lifted from a number of his previous compositions, especially Enemy At The Gates (he was still using that film's principal motif five years even further down the line in Avatar). The end result featured plenty of orchestral bombast and bluster and incessant female wailing, which ultimately left the soundtrack feeling like a second-rate version of Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard's work on Gladiator. The end credits also featured a perfectly decent but unnecessary and overbearing ballad by Josh Groban.

To me the musical cues of the director's cut genuinely prove that less really is more. Groban's song is removed and the irritating wailing all but eradicated. Many of the generic heroic and action motifs were removed in favour of a score that was distinctly more understated, sombre, and melancholic. Call me a killjoy but the more sorrowful and low-key tone of the soundtrack served to more effectively underscore the horrors of war and the sacrifices and tragic loss of life that it entails- a key theme running throughout the story.

So there you have it, five reasons why I don't think Troy deserves to be as maligned as it has been and why it's worth a re-visit, especially the director's cut if you don't happen to have seen that version yet. What do you think? And are you at all excited by the upcoming Hercules film or by any other classically-set films that might be in production? Please leave a comment below.