Reviews

Avatar was fantastic, in both meanings of the word.

It was a stunning piece of film making. It was full of wonder and magic; of detailed, creative vision and imagination; of good guys and bad guys; of visually stunning action and surprisingly touching moments; of exotic and other-worldly romance; of lessons that relate to real life --- and those that relate only to our dreams.

I saw it just two hours ago. Since it was such a fantasy, I don't know how long or how importantly it will stay with me. But while I was watching it, Avatar commanded my attention and imagination better than all but, at most, a handful of movies I have seen in the last two years.

Apocalypto is probably one of the ten best movies of the year, a compelling action movie with not only adrenaline, but also brains and heart. Its portrayal of the Mayan culture -- including its strange dress, hair styles, costumes, tattoos, body piercing, and decorative scars, as well as its industry, class system, cities, warfare, weapons, myth, and religion -- provide a bizarre and fascinating anthropological backdrop for what is, at its heart, a solid, thrilling, fast paced old fashioned struggle between good guys and bad guys. The movie does have a lot of violence. But the violence is woven into a story with characters we care about. It is a realistic part of the culture being described. And it is not shown in a hyper gruesome manner, as is much of movie violence today. Thus, I found it much less offensive than many reviews had led me to believe I would. Unlike in some movies, I found the subtitles in Apocalypto so easy to read that most of time I forgot I was reading them. If anything the strange language only adds to the tone of exotic strangeness that pervades this unusually good and thrilling movie.

Troy, the movie, has flaws, but it also many strengths. It is a much better than many of the critics give it credit for.

Yes, Brad Pitt's Achilles is not perfect, but I can not think of any major actor who could do a better job portraying a man who thinks, moves, fights, and looks like he is an equal to the gods. Eric Bana's Hector was fantastic. Contrary to many of the reviews I did not find there were too many characters to allow any to be well developed. Yes, there were many characters, as the Iliad requires, but Achilles, Hector, and Paris were well developed and the story largely revolved around them.

Among the minor characters, Sean Bean's Odysseus shined, as did Saffron Burrows' portrayal of Hector's wife. The costumes and sets did a wonderful job of bringing to life the late Bronze Age, a time more primitive and further removed from our collective consciousness than that of ancient Rome.

The battle scenes were less gratuitous and were easier to follow than in many movies. Several of the one-on-one fight scenes, particularly that between Achilles and Hector, were exceptional.

For me the movie's 2 hour and 40 minutes sped by. The script did have a few dumb lines, but also some good one. It is foolish to criticize the movie for taking substantial liberties with Homer's book. Any high budget movie of the Iliad that was faithful to Homer would have been financial suicide for its investors and much less satisfying to most viewers.

My major complaints were that Diane Kruger, although clearly attractive, was not the rare one-in-a-hundred-thousand beauty (like the young Candice Bergen) that Helen should have been. I personally found Saffron Burrows much more attractive. I also thought that Brain Cox's Agamemnon was a little too much of a cartoon villain. But then many have complained the plot was too full of moral equivalence, so perhaps painting someone as a black hat was needed to make the story more emotionally accessible to the masses.

In summary, I think it is likely that when 2004 ends, Troy will be at least one of my 10 favorite films of the years.