Critic After Dark

Asedillo (Celso Ad Castillo, 1971)

2026-08-16T17:51:29.660-04:00

Gun and typewriter

By 1971 Celso Ad Castillo had written and directed a number of features when he was tapped by Fernando Poe Jr. to direct a biopic on one Teodoro Asedillo, a former schoolteacher and police chief turned revolutionary during the American Occupation.

Apparently the two were feeling each other out. Ad Castillo may be a veteran filmmaker, having written eighteen scripts and nine features previously, but FPJ (as Poe is popularly known) had at this point directed eight, produced fifty, acted in approximately ninety. Ad Castillo must have acquitted himself well; FPJ called him 'my little genius' and asked him to direct three more pictures in quick succession (Ang Alamat, 1972; Sto Domingo, 1972; and Esteban, 1973)

FPJ was said to have impressed Ad Castillo in turn with the scene of Asedillo addressing the people of San Antonio (see pic above) who, thanks to American propaganda, have lost faith in him. The shoot happened in the latter part of the day, involved a high wide shot with plenty of extras, was eight pages long on paper including an intense monologue; on top of which they had already been delayed some three to four hours setting up. FPJ was exhausted; his brow furrowed while reading the script, and no one knew if he was happy or not with what Ad Castillo had written.

Then the movie star launched into it: a long, involved speech at the end of which he was yelling himself hoarse, and you felt the frustration exhaustion and anger in his voice wasn't all acting.*

The film is considered one of FPJ's best, helping establish his reputation as a formidable gunslinger and defender of the downtrodden poor, but when I first saw it, in a degraded video copy, I struggled to see why-- yes Ad Castillo did an excellent job of mythmaking and yes the concept seemed simple enough, a teacher turned rebel against American oppression, but the muddy image and barely legible dialogue made the experience a slog.

After a thorough restoration by FPJ Productions in 2017 it's as if the scales fell off my eyes, the wax run from my ears: I could actually follow the plot from what the characters are saying and get the gist of the action in the occasional nighttime firefights; I could gaze upon the surrounding Laguna landscape-- the high hills, the wide lakes, the scorched gold sunrises. Been to Laguna many a time, and have tried to capture some of that beauty on a measly cellphone; Ad Castillo with cinematographer Sergio Lobo (Manila by Night, Himala ) succeed on an emotionally epic scale.

The film opens on thatched huts huddled on a mountaintop; the huts look unkempt and empty, their eaves decorated with tattered Christmas parols. We see an unlit lamp, a crock hanging on rope, a bloodstained bamboo bed-- Ad Castillo basically setting the film's pensive tone by giving us a taste of where this will all end.

The tale isn't totally new-- man seeks to redress injustice, is blocked by a system built to protect the established rich. In Asedillo's case he's more self-aware than most; as schoolteacher he chafes at having to teach his students the hymn "Philippines, My Philippines" in English instead of Tagalog, and refuses to use the Department of Public Instruction-approved English-language textbooks because the students find them difficult to relate to, much less understand.

Asedillo is fired for insubordination, becomes chief of police in Paete, is fired from that for embezzlement (a charge he vehemently denies). I'm guessing there's a deleted scene somewhere as the sequence starts outside the Paete town hall at night with the closeup of a hand striking a match, the hand moving back to reveal a shadowed man lighting his cigarette (a nicely ominous shot)-- then awkwardly cuts to Asedillo in the midst of being beaten by his own officers.

I blame missing footage, but there are other instances in the picture when you feel the action has taken a confusing leap (subplots that don't lead anywhere, crucial developments that occur offscreen, sudden changes in character or story) that suggest another possibility: Ad Castillo doesn't really prioritize clarity in his films, preferring to focus on staging passages of bravura filmmaking over worrying if the passages will actually form a comprehensive narrative later on.

The gambit works, more or less; you can imagine movie audiences-- particularly Filipino audiences of the '70s-- not caring much about logical progression, you imagine Ad Castillo counting on that lack of concern. Cavalier attitude towards storytelling aside, the director (who was also screenwriter) does have an eloquent if florid way with words, which he instructs his actors to deliver in an understated deadpan; when Asedillo's friend Abel (an almost unrecognizably young Ruel Vernal) cautions him about fighting the town mayor (confusingly called 'the municipal president') Asedillo replies: "Ever since I was a child my father taught me to value my honor above my life. Abel hear me-- the man you're talking to is dead. They've killed my honor."

Can't emphasize enough how important Fernando Poe Jr.'s conviction is to this scene, or to the role itself; if he were to wink-- if his belief in the character's integrity were to waver at any point-- the performance would collapse unwittingly into camp. Poe speaks clearly if slowly, his one and only acting style, and depends on writing and direction to add nuance; in many ways he resembles John Wayne, an actor of strong persona but limited range. Wayne at his best attempted to question that persona (see The Searchers); FPJ never did, but there's something humble even charming in the way the man knew his limits and stayed firmly inside them. We can laugh at his antediluvian manners or we can pause, view him with nonjudgmental eyes, maybe appreciate how said manners give him, his character, even the film itself, a larger-than-life stature rarely seen beforehand, never surpassed since.

Asedillo at this point is disgraced but what turns him into an out-and-out criminal is a murder charge. Next-door neighbor Atong (Mario Escudero) has learned that Abel has been bedding his wife; in an extended sequence that evokes noir and giallo and (oddest of all) Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," Atong invites Abel to his house to sample a jug of lambanog (powerful coconut wine that, as Atong puts it, "has been steeped in raisins for five years"). While Abel sips, Atong pulls out his shotgun and exacts memorable vengeance, Ad Castillo switching from lurid color to startling black-and-white because-- well I'm not sure why. Because he can?

And Asedillo must avenge Abel because-- not sure why either. Far as I can tell Abel was a sneaky shifty-eyed jerk (we're talking Ruel Vernal after all) and not much of a friend overall, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do, and as the soldiers escort Atong across the river sniffing into (wiping away tears with?) a bloodstained rag (his wife's chemise?) Asedillo raises his shotgun heavily to his shoulder (you feel his reluctance) and fires, dropping not just Atong but-- to underline the irrevocability of the act-- the two officers flanking him.

And then-- and then-- as Atong's body is carried away by the waters the incarnadine rag slips from his nerveless hands and acquires a life of its own, curling and unfurling and swirling down the restless current, a wordless symbol of Atong's anguished departing soul; that, or Asedillo's swiftly vanishing prospects for a quiet life, the pivotal moment when he finds himself well and truly outside the law.

That's both the ignominy and glory I think of FPJ's 'little genius' (Ad Castillo's nicknames including 'The Kid' and, oddly appropriate, 'The Messiah')-- he only occasionally nods in the direction of the script; you sense a wayward spirit more interested in winkling out moments where he can improvise, build on something, link one shot after another in a daisy chain of images until suddenly out of nowhere he's formed an amazing evocative sequence that serves no immediate practical purpose but lingers on the tongue like an aftertaste of paradise, a touch of the divine. When he struggles (as in his silly remake of Ang Pinakamagandang Hayop sa Balat ng Lupa, 1996), he will manage at most one or two such scenes; when his mojo is working (as in this film) he can toss off five without looking and end the picture aiming to pull off a sixth (likely as not succeeding).

Impossible to submit Ad Castillo to critical analysis, I submit, because there isn't much to analyze; to yield meaningful results a film must have a guiding intelligence behind it that chooses this direction or that, follows some meaty hidden theme that over time will allow itself to be dissected and categorized and neatly displayed under a glass case. I'm not sure Ad Castillo works that way; I can only attempt to help us-- Robert Heinlein of all people came up with a word-- grok Ad Castillo by citing moments when he's at his most heedlessly inspired, pulling off visual miracles with little preparation scant resources and even less money.

Hence aside from the mysterious moody opening, the speech before the town of San Antonio, and that amazing throwaway image of the bloodied rag fluttering down the river, I'll cite the scene right after a punishing raid, when Asedillo's group finds itself knocked back on its heels and forced to bury its dead. Under a low dim sky the rebel leader presents a makeshift crucifix to his men: "Forget that we hide in the mountains," he tells them. "Forget that we're far from our loved ones. In the name of our comrades who died defending our rights I swear--" and the director cuts to a wide shot as the man thrusts the length of wood downward, and we hear the hiss of the sharpened end driven into soil like a stake into a man's heart, and he continues: "-- on this spot, we plant the tree of our cause. We are the first leaves to sprout from this tree, we will be the first to fall; but others will sprout in our place and continue the fight, to defend the rights of the abused."

Ad Castillo may pay scant obeisance to the gods of scriptwriting but I swear he can write weighty monologues that, while hardly Shakespearean, evokes however distantly the Bard's way with cadence and metaphor and outsized sentiments, likely thanks to his years of writing popular komiks (often under a pseudonym), and for genre movies of all kinds (war, horror, espionage, parodies). Somewhere along the way he learned eloquence, and the sight of it sprouting from the melodrama, like blossoms from a rotting tree branch, only underlines its miraculous nature.

Then there's the long sequence of the officer on his horse marching his troops through town, one of Asedillo's men bound and dragged behind. The townsfolk watch as the soldiers pass, crowd around, press close; one by one as the officer lopes ahead the soldiers following are pulled aside, overwhelmed, and gagged. Finally the officer sees a fellow figure on horseback ahead, the camera lens deliberately out of focus; when the blurred figure finally rides up close enough to resolve into Asedillo, the officer reaches for his gun-- and only then realizes he's surrounded not by his troops but by the unsmiling crowd he rode so imperiously through.

Asedillo draws closer, the only sound the clop of his horse; he informs the officer: "Tell your superiors my fight isn't with you or your fellow soldiers. You are one of the people whose rights I'm trying to defend."

It's a clever sequence that underlines along the way how united Asedillo is with the townfolk-- that in whatever the rebel group is doing the town is complicit, that the members of the group are indistinguishable from the citizens of the town, and the poor officer was outnumbered the moment he rode in.

Then there's Asedillo's confrontation with fellow rebel Vicente (Paquito Diaz) in their mountaintop hideout, with the camera looks over Vicente's shoulder at Asedillo. Ad Castillo couldn't put things more dramatically: the long barrel of Vicente's rifle is pointed straight at the revolutionary's chest who is framed, in turn, by the glittering magnificence of Laguna Lake; Asedillo walks carefully from right to left, addressing the pointed rifle in a low voice: "Vicente. Any time you want to shoot--" suddenly there's a pistol in his hand "--go ahead and shoot."

At which point I need to pause to reflect on the magnificence that is Paquito Diaz. Bearded and mustachioed, often cast as goon or rapist (here he's caught by Asedillo's men in mid-act), it takes a strong character actor to play adversary to the film's star, an even stronger actor to play adversary to arguably the biggest star in all of Philippine cinema, and Diaz steps into the role with confident ease. Vicente states his case: that he was driven to attempt sexual assault by hunger, exhaustion, endless cold, by the prospect of no reward beyond the vague promise of some future justice, and no man can be expected to endure so much for so little reward. He almost makes his story convincing, calling into question the justice or even sanity of what Asedillo is attempting.

And Diaz beyond his oft underrated acting abilities is a badass. If FPJ is reportedly a crack shot and blindingly fast draw, Diaz in turn has the physical agility to execute a double-legged strike at either side of FPJ's head with almost casual elan-- and do it upside-down.

And then there's Asedillo's ultimate fate, prefaced by a long sad sequence of the men huddled around the fire pulling their blankets tighter against the unceasing wind, one by one coming to their leader to shamefacedly ask if they can take leave to visit their families for Christmas-- not sure if they can come back after.

Asedillo is left with a much-reduced force guarding his little hut (decorated with already fraying Christmas parols) and seated in front of his typewriter, and again pause a moment to note how Ad Castillo depicts that boxy mechanical instrument, a gesture on his part against the cliche of the strong hero type, often inarticulate to the point of being mute; the man of clever one-liners fit only for viral memes ("enough talk!" "I'll be back!"), readier to express himself with gunfire than with actual ideas. The true-life Asedillo was an educator and labor organizer, a thinker and intellectual; he constantly questioned the American hegemony and knew the value of propaganda, of owning the narrative (hence his attempt early on to provide his students with an alternative education, and later his gambit of presenting himself to the town of San Antonio, in an attempt to win back their hearts).

Unfortunately Ad Castillo's approach isn't perfect: we learn little of what the rebel leader wrote-- not even a brief moment of him reading aloud from his typescript-- and we get little sense of how well he's doing in the propaganda war against the Americans (He definitely has the attention-- and trust-- of San Antonio, but what about outside the town? What about the American accusations that he's a mere bandit and terrorist?).

We do at least have this-- the man in his little hut pecking out letters, messages, statements, to his men and to the world at large. A mere image but Ad Castillo gives it the force of an emblem, a gesture of defiance against the established authority gathering about to silence him; the romance to it, the lack of substantial detail behind it, the director's fatalistic acknowledgement of its ultimate futility actually adds (I submit) to the mystique. Call it Ad Castillo's idea of himself, the writer-director, churning out eloquence in word and image drawn from near-nothing, almost as if by magic, weaving a spell of power and invincibility against an encroaching inevitable darkness.

*(Thanks to film writer Epoy Deyto for the anecdote)

The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026)

2026-07-30T14:21:36.409-04:00

Long day's journey into night

(Warning: story and plot twists of the movie-- and the three thousand year old epic poem the movie is based on-- discussed in explicit detail!)

First things first: Got no problem with Lupita Nyong'o's Helen/Clytemnestra or Elliot Page's Sinon (not Achilles as conservative pundits had complained about early on); Helen's fierce bitterness about being pawn and property to Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and Sinon's hauntingly solemn reproaches to Odysseus for using him as bait are rare bright spots in the movie.

I do have problems with Matt Damon as Odysseus.

Been noted that Homer's opening line sums up our first impression of the man, sets the emotional tone of the rest of the epic, is hence the most difficult to translate. Robert Fitzgerald's lyrically elevated take literally takes flight: "Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending"

Robert Fagles, whose translation was the first I've read, is a bit more grounded: "Sing to me of the Man, Muse, of the man of many twists and turns"

Emily Wilson in the latest English translation (the first ever done of the complete poem by a woman, in English) is blunt: "Tell me about a complicated man"

Tell me, reading all those differing versions-- "skilled in all ways" "of many twists and turns" "complicated"-- does the thought of Matt Damon ever once pop up?

More, recalling the few scenes between Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and Odysseus-- does tall stately Hathaway look in any way like she'd fall for stumpy Damon, who has about as much sex appeal as a dachshund?

I'm being cruel, I take that back. Damon is handsome, physically fit (far fitter than I am, I'll admit), and has plenty of appeal, the kind you find in a faithful hound, that puppy dog that follows you everywhere tail wagging; I can imagine women loving him because they can't imagine him lying to them, much less dating other women behind their backs. Later in the picture Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) accuses Odysseus of being aware of Charybdis and Scylla all along ("You knew!" he yells somewhat redundantly) and I had to laugh. How did Eurylochus realize Odysseus was holding back? Because one glance at Damon and you just know he's guilty of hiding something.

As that all-important first line sets the tone for Homer's epic so Damon and his performance sets the tone for the rest of Nolan's production: aside from the fact that it follows Homer's narrative-- a tale within a tale within a, functioning like a story that starts in media res then swings back and forth in time in typical Nolan fashion (only Nolan likely didn't pluck the idea of intricately nested narratives out of thin air, he got it from Homer) this is basically a straightforward meat and potatoes adaptation, with a touch of Virgil's The Aeneid-- Odysseus more as ruthless strategist than resourceful hero.

Nolan actually does well for most of the running time-- he whips things along at a fair clip, includes most of the important incidents, relies on a lot of analog effects-- a giant puppet for Polyphemus, an ingenious method to simulate Charybdis (he does use CGI to polish said effects; his publicity presents him as a purist but he's careful to demand a budget that can afford digital fixes). He plays Matt Damon fair with us, striking a deal where we sit still for three hours and he in turn delivers the best Odyssey $250 million can buy.

In the grand tradition of biblical epics you spot the occasional celebrity cameo (is that...John Leguizamo? And Pattinson? And... Tom Holland! Charlize Theron... Samantha Morton... Zendaya... does Jason Bourne get to beat up The Batman?!)-- have to admit Cecil B DeNolan puts on a good show.

Need to mention that Odysseus' dog Argos is partly performed by a poorly animated puppet. Not that I mind puppetry much-- it has its charms-- but more than realism the marionette must deliver a performance, and this one was so inexpressive Nolan had to cut to a flashback of the dog as a puppy to try wring a few more tears from the audience. I don't think the flashback helps.

Disappointed there are few gods, with some of the appearances debatable-- as I argued in Troy the gods here function as the higher and lower sentiments of people, their id and superego in effect; if you want a little more psychology out of your Homer, you could do worse than listen to what the gods have to say.

Plus the gods play a to my mind more important function: they're the comic relief, the running commentary, the above-the-fray eyes one needs to take a break from the ground-level action and appreciate the long view. Nolan's three hours, I submit, would pass by more swiftly if Hermes were to pop in, or Zeus throw a tantrum (a literal one of the Olivier school, not metaphorical thunder and lightning).

Nolan inserts an agenda: that of a great man with a secret guilt, a hidden sin he has to contend with before the movie is through with him-- we saw this in Oppenheimer and as far back as Memento-- and that's a fair objective; filmmakers often have a subject they like to play variations on, trying to hone their thesis, and The Odyssey-- whose original Odysseus is a relatively simpler man, unreflective enough that he feels no guilt for Troy but feels remorse for each member of his fallen crew-- is large enough and sturdy enough a vessel to accommodate such a reading.

My problem is I don't feel Nolan pulls it off. We need a man able to feel hubris, because he's so devious, because he pulls off tricks and ploys and delights in them, sometimes to his downfall (see the aftermath of his encounter with Polyphemus). Damon doesn't look as if he has the confidence to bluff, much less manipulate anyone into anything, doesn't look like he can ascend high enough to convincingly earn himself any amount of hubris; if he's going to undergo some kind of downfall it's not going to be much of a drop.

While we're talking about Homer's nested narratives and Nolan's insertions might as well insert my problems with Polyphemus. Right after saying Nolan isn't wrong to put his own spin on Homer I'm going to submit that not having Polyphemus and Odysseus talk is a huge wasted opportunity, as we learn details grotesque and grotesquely endearing about both captor and captive. Folks like to point out that our hero keeps encountering examples of men and monsters who violate 'xenia' (what Nolan calls 'Zeus' Law,' or the law of hospitality); that's not entirely true with Homer's Polyphemus who does possess a perverse sense of xenia, promising that in return for Odysseus' offer of wine he'll eat him last. Homer's Polyphemus is funny, in a crudely obscene way, and tender, at least towards the giant rams he's herding; Odysseus in turn is just as funny, passing himself off as 'Nobody' and yes hubristic, as he outsmarts himself because he can't resist taking credit. Forget straightforward people-chomping horror movies a la The Blob or Alien, think mutated horror-comedies like Evil Dead 2, where the hero spites his demon by chainsawing his arm off.

But okay-- not the sort of thing Nolan would do. But Homer did, and as a result (I submit) his poem has stayed popular for thousands of years.

Nolan's notions of trauma and the horrors of war are weak tea and I don't mean blood and literal guts, tho Homer dishes up his share (again, see Polyphemus)-- when I think of a properly depicted wartime atrocity and the protagonist's disturbing involvement one moment that comes to mind is the Tafas massacre in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia-- a tasteful minimum of blood, but the real power of that sequence is the image of the retreating Turkish army, and the vast widescreen desert offering them no refuge. Cut to a gigantic closeup of Peter O'Toole as Lawrence eyes wide and staring, pulled in different directions by different kinds of impulses: rage at what the Turks had done; thirst to exact revenge; and his own sense of horror at the bloodlust welling up his throat.

Now imagine Mr. Damon decked out in white robes in that same arid landscape, with Mr. Nolan behind the camera.

I'd even call into question Nolan's insistence that we watch the movie not just in IMAX but 70 mm IMAX, to 'immerse ourselves in the experience'-- it's a big canvas but Nolan keeps the action safely in screen's center so IMAX or not, 70 mm or 35 mm or widescreen TV or cellphone or not, the image-- or the part of the image Nolan considers crucial to the story-- remains readily visible. He insists on the very best format but wastes said format on conventional filmmaking that will fit anywhere. He shrinks from the kind of recklessness Kurosawa demonstrated in The Hidden Fortress, where Tohoscope reveals the massive scale of Akizuki Castle, and the extrawide frame emphasizes the length of dueling spears; he falls short of the tension crafted by Leone, standing three mysterious gunfighters in the middle of a lonely train station in the wordless 15-minute opening of Once Upon a Time in the West; he lacks Godard's audacity, staging an enigmatic yet playful cat-and-mouse game between Camille and Paul as they pad through the rooms and doorways and sofa and bed, fully clothed and naked, of their Roman apartment in Les Mepris (an incidentally far superior far more moving adaptation of The Odyssey-- not the least because its subtext is Godard's own disintegrating marriage to his wife and muse Anna Karina).

Two more points and I'm done: I wonder about Mr. Nolan's emphasis on xenia, its practice and violation. In his movie Odysseus is punished-- or punishes himself-- for breaking xenia by having the Trojans take his horse into their city where the soldiers inside the horse can unlock the gates and plunder and kill. He feels remorse for this, as any proper Nolan-style 'great man' protagonist would and should.

But-- and I could be wrong, missed some detail or misunderstood some aspect of ancient Greek culture-- was xenia violated? The horse wasn't meant for the Trojans but for Athena, to beg her for safe passage home; the Trojans merely decided (prompted by a bit of clever reverse psychology by Odysseus) to steal the horse and bring it into their city, steal Athena's favor for themselves.

So the Trojans were screwed over by a felony they committed, of a horse that happened to hide a dozen Greek soldiers; where's the breaking of xenia? And if that violation of ethics didn't happen, why were Odysseus and his men punished? More, if Odysseus feels so bad about the massacre, why does he follow up by massacring the visitors in his own home? I submit Homer's characters, being simpler, also made more sense; if Nolan felt he could shoehorn a more elaborate motive into his Odysseus without bothering to come up with a plausible explanation-- well I'd call that his hubris talking.

That final massacre by the way-- we build up to it, we see Odysseus suffering and losing his men one by one, we see Penelope and Telemachus struggle to maintain their dignity and integrity in a rising tide of abuse (Nolan conveniently downplaying the fact that Odysseus in the meantime fooled around first with Circe then Calypso, or that Calypso voices an eloquent complaint-- not heard in the film-- about the double standard between men and women when it came to adultery), we badly want to see the suitors get their comeuppance. And Nolan to his credit does pull off a scene where Odysseus pretends to struggle with the bow and Penelope averts her face in weary disappointment, and her husband-- seeing her turn away and quickly stringing the bow and plucking it-- lets loose a low lovely chord, easily the most emotionally resonant moment in the movie.

And then everything falls apart. Shaky handheld 70 mm IMAX shots connected by incoherent editing; a lot of action you can't follow because Nolan-- from the Dark Knight trilogy to Inception to Tenet to this picture-- has shown again and again he can't shoot and edit hand-to-hand combat worth a damn. Odysseus wandered thirty years but was at least granted a happy end, albeit a little different from Homer's; I sit through three hours of mid storytelling to be rewarded the visual equivalent of hamburger. I stuck to my end of the deal, sat still for a hundred and eighty minutes; Nolan could at least have the decency to dip into the $100 to $150 million he stands to earn from The Odyssey's enormous boxoffice (some $700 million and counting) and give me my thirty dollars back.

Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004)

2026-07-23T12:37:36.805-04:00

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

Wolfgang Peterson's Troy is an odd mix-- a summer blockbuster with the patina of a sincere attempt at adapting a literary classic painted all over its bright surface. David Benioff's script, loosely-- very loosely-- based on Homer's epic, tries to re-imagine the story as it might really have happened, that is, closer to what people might conceivably have thought and felt, filtered through what we might feel happened. For starters, Benioff (a newcomer, but not an entirely inept one--he wrote the novel 25th Hour and adapted it for Spike Lee to direct) does away with all the inconvenient gods and goddesses, without whom you get the impression Greeks and Trojans couldn't put one foot in front of the other much less wage a war. Then he incorporates a more cynical, more realpolitik motive for Agamemnon (Brian Cox) to go into battle: not to win back his brother Menelaus' (Brendan Gleeson) stolen wife Helen (Diane Kruger), but to use her kidnapping as a pretext to move on Troy, a bid to add the mighty kingdom to his already impressive collection of conquered territories (an act of arrogant aggression, in effect, by an established world power).

Which is all well and good, an interesting attack on the problem of telling a well-known story in a fresh way. It's the second step-- filtering all this through what we may feel happened-- that's problematic, the "we" presumably meaning the summer movie crowd (which couldn't care less about the quarrels of dead Mediterranean dictators), and "filtering what we may feel happened," meaning taking out what motives and acts violate our ideas about the world--motives and acts so alien to our narrow conception of human thought and deed that we might reject the movie completely.

As a result the edge of most characters has been filed down to a glossy sheen. Achilles' (Brad Pitt) insufferably godlike ego is now merely spoiled-celebrity annoying; his near-homoerotic friendship with Patroclus (Garett Hedlund) has been explained away as love for a cousin; Paris (Orlando Bloom) and Helen are dewy young, genuinely in love. Everyone has been pulled down to ground level, humanized, made-- well-- rather nice; even Hector's (Eric Bana) bloodthirstiness feels dutiful and restrained. Other changes seem more drastic: the siege of Troy is reduced from a bone-wearying nine years to what seems like a matter of weeks--instead of soldiers so tired of attacking and retreating and attacking again for over three thousand days that they snatch at every excuse to go home, we get a quick bivouac; the troops must feel as if they hardly got to see the place.

Even the gods are missed. They may meddle in the affairs of men, but to my mind they also served a vital purpose in Homer's vision: they represented the less inhibited, more chaotic, at times more transcendent sentiments of the human protagonists--their id and superego, if you will. The gods are in effect humans to the nth power, so if the human characters seem so shallowly conceived, it's because the gods were there, above and behind and around them, thinking their baser and nobler thoughts for them.

So Benioff's script has taken Homer's immortal characters and given them mortal emotions and motivations-- fine; perhaps the crucial question to ask is: how are the actors that play these characters?

Brian Cox probably comes closest to the original concept of his character with his bombastic, scenery-chewing Agamemnon (they should have just let him gnaw on the gates of Troy if they wanted in so bad). Eric Bana does well with his kindler, gentler Hector; he gets to glower and look sorrowful as he takes leave of wife Andromache (Saffron Burrows--who, incidentally, would have made a lovelier, more fascinating Helen) and child. Sean Bean as wily Odysseus gives an intriguing performance, with his low-key presence that hovers between a sense of genuine affection for Achilles and a sense that he's perhaps exploiting him. Peter O'Toole as King Priam gives a command performance, all noble and faded grandeur in the same shaky skinny frame.

Orlando Bloom and Diane Kruger as the aforementioned Paris and Helen are pretty faces and a complete waste of screen space (every moment spent on them is a genuine pain); Garett Hedlund leaves little impression as Brad Pitt's lookalike and object of lust--sorry--of cousinly affection. As for the Pittster himself, I suppose the idea was that since Achilles had such a serious star complex, they needed one of the biggest of the Hollywood variety to deliver the necessary wattage--forgetting that playing a big star is still a performance, and all you really need is an actor in the role. Pitt has fearsome biceps and an undemanding physical grace, but in the major dramatic moments, when say he realizes his lover-- sorry cousin--has died, he manages to squeeze out a constipated expression as if he needed more nonsoluble fiber. You only need wait a little longer, when O'Toole's Priam gazes at the (spoiler warning--but is it at all necessary?) devastation of Troy, to see what real acting looks like.

The Iliad for all intents and purposes is a comic book-- violent, ribald, funny, full of bright colors, and except for all the names and history to keep track of, gloriously unmarred by the subtler shades of human psychology. What presumably lifts this popular entertainment to the level of great art would be the poetry, the use of metaphor and literary device in a way that transforms all the vulgar elements into something greater than the sum of its parts. Short of having someone actually recite the entire work in front of a camera-- interesting idea but hardly anything a major studio would fork $200 million over to produce-- you need to come up with the cinematic equivalent to all that divine poetry; you need an artist who can evoke the term 'Homeric' in visual terms. The list of filmmakers isn't long: Griffith, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, Welles. In Jean-Luc Godard's Fritz Lang plays a filmmaker intent on filming The Odyssey; bet no cinephile will deny the thrill that shot down their spines, considering the possibility of Lang doing Homer.

Alas, Wolfgang Petersen isn't one to inspire such thrills; he's purely a meat-and-potatoes filmmaker in dire need of salt. Not unintelligent, but incapable, after years of Hollywood productions, of lifting both feet off the ground. His battle scenes aren't stupid per se, nor do they excite the senses; his big shots, of millions of digitally rendered Trojan and Greek warriors marching across the plains and beaches of Troy, look indistinguishable from any other millions of digitally rendered warriors marching across movie screens in recent years. The drama has some traction, thanks to Benioff's fairly cunning screenplay, but it finally sinks under the weight of Pitt's epic inadequacies as a dramatic actor. Troy fails to be even a halfway decent adaptation of one of the great works of Western literature; perhaps the filmmakers realized this, and never meant to aim for such lofty goals. But it also fails as entertainment, unlike Homer's epic.

Truth of the matter is, Homer's "Iliad" was or still is superb popcorn fare-- the headlong narrative full of incident; the larger-than-life characters; the constant intercession of superpowered gods (Greek literature's equivalent to CGI); it's even proven property, having thrilled wide-eyed readers for almost three thousand years. The filmmakers could have realized this and done a straightforward rendition of the story, instead of making a $200 million hundred-and-sixty-plus minute waste of time.

First published in Businessworld 5.21.04