By Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter

"Troy," a tale of heroism and ignominious defeat, unfolds on a grand scale with an armada of 1,000 ships, vast armies, huge egos and volcanic passions. At least that's the movie's design.

As executed by director Wolfgang Petersen, who should have the right background for films about war and men under stress, "Troy" is a protracted and uninvolving affair in which men battle over issues that audiences may struggle to find compelling, and no central figure emerges to take command of the film.

Clearly, Warner Bros. backed this expensive movie -- reportedly as costly as $175 million -- in the hope of throwing a "Gladiator"-like toga party at the box office. Casting blond and newly buffed Brad Pitt as sullen Greek hero Achilles certainly boosts its chances worldwide, but the battles tend to look like those body pileups in rugby matches, and the drama remains stubbornly unfocused and remote. Warners may also have a tough job selling male audiences conditioned by video-game combat on a movie where soldiers beat on one another with primitive Bronze Age weapons.

"Troy" is "inspired" by "The Iliad," Homer's epic poem about the Greek siege of Troy. The filmmakers chose that word carefully. Not only does much of their story derive from ancient literary sources other than Homer and the script often take extreme liberties with Greek mythology, but Petersen and writer David Benioff jettison Zeus and the whole Olympian cosmos. Yes, this version of "The Iliad" is godless.

Admittedly, it's virtually impossible to simulate onscreen the wildly dysfunctional family of self-centered immortals that compose Greek polytheism. But to remove the gods from what is, after all, a Greek myth is to gut your story. By playing down the divine, you lose the story's sense of fate, destiny and tragedy.

These people believe in their gods. When a hero fights "like a god," many genuinely wonder if he might not be born of a god and therefore undefeatable. And a leader who heeds seers and omens looks foolish rather than wise, as he does in Homer. This is a key element of the ancients' psychology, and it turns up missing here.

Instead, you have Hollywood god Pitt preening before the camera as long-haired Achilles, who fights for no one but himself and the future glory of his name. His opposite number and defender of Troy is Eric Bana's Hector -- here, as in Homer, the tale's most sympathetic figure. But the film domesticates him too much. While there is nothing wrong with viewing Hector as a man of family and honor, he spends too much time indoors. Bana is not a particularly athletic actor, so his fighting looks staged. Nor does the script ever allow him to flush with anger or take charge of his own destiny.

The legendary war circa 1200 B.C. ignites, of course, when Paris (a much too pretty Orlando Bloom, Prince of Troy and Hector's younger brother, steals away Helen (Diane Kruger), the much younger wife of Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), the brutish King of Sparta. Menelaus' wily brother, Agamemnon (Brian Cox), King of the Mycenaeans, unites the tribes of Greece to attack Troy not so much to expunge family dishonor as to bring into his empire the previously unsacked citadel that is Troy. Inside that walled city, aging King Priam (Peter O'Toole) counts on its massive walls, his son Hector and the god Apollo -- oops, never mind about Apollo -- to protect his people.

Petersen's big sequences -- the computer-generated armada, the massive battles between surging armies and the trickery of the Trojan horse (borrowed from "The Aeneid") -- are impressive in long shots but lack power and terror in their details. When the screen clears for individual matchups, things improve, but this kind of hand-to-hand combat is heavy going and brutal rather than nimble and exciting.

The film's more intimate scenes between generals in conflict or families in peril bog down with strained, even corny dialogue and static action. When Paris slips into Helen's bedroom as her husband revels downstairs and she pouts, "Last night was a mistake," the film veers off course into bedroom comedy. When Agamemnon and Menelaus rage against their generals or the world, you sense their thuggery but never their cunning.

The actors give robust performances, but Benioff's characters lack complexity. A few, such as Sean Bean's Odysseus and O'Toole's magisterial king, manage to suggest people with balance in their lives and a tinge of self-doubt. The rest, like today's politicos, stay stridently "on message," never deviating from their elemental selves and without much growth or inner conflict.

Pitt's Achilles is almost amusingly self-involved. He is mentally writing the Legend of Achilles even as he performs heroic deeds. Indeed, he confronts Hector on the first day while storming the beach but fails to engage him in battle. "It's too early to kill princes," he haughtily declares.

There is a good scene between O'Toole and Pitt late in the movie, and the look on O'Toole's face as he watches his city burn is simply fine acting. But mostly the film lacks memorable scenes or even memorable moments.

Nigel Phelps' art design is all over the place. While no one knows what Troy looked like, the archeology here is Old Hollywood. Troy is vaguely pre-Islam Middle Eastern, with exteriors reminiscent of D.W. Griffith Babylon sequence in "Intolerance" and interiors Cecil B. DeMille would have loved. The fire-lit banquet hall in Sparta looks medieval, but the costumes read Roman.

James Horner's music has the requisite sweep and majesty for an epic, and Roger Pratt's cinematography, while relying too much on helicopter shots, helps bring the ancient world to life.