Photos: Everett Collection ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps

For years, the 2004 movie Troy felt pretty close to what film critic (and Decider contributor!) Nathan Rabin deemed a forgotbuster—a movie that was a fairly big hit at the box office, but leaves relatively little cultural trace with the passage of time. The summer-box-office boom times that, in retrospect, we were largely experiencing throughout much of the past 30-plus years before COVID gave the whole situation a scary reset naturally has plenty such titles. When there are a dozen or more movies making $100 million in North America every summer just a matter of course, not all of them will be as heavily discussed and rewatched as, say, a Christopher Nolan movie.

Then again, buzz around Christopher Nolan movies can powerful enough to unearth up some forgotbusters on its own. Hence some internet discussion swirling around the fairly unlikely subject of Troy, a 2004 historical epic that was, to be fair, the sixth-highest-grossing movie of summer 2004. It’s come up again because Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey looms as a July release; Wolfgang Petersen’s highly condensed version of The Iliad was the last big-budget Homer adaptation to score a similarly high-profile summer-movie slot.

At the time, Troy held a few more distinctions. First, it was a major box office flex for the star power of Brad Pitt; though the cast has other familiar names and faces mixing veterans and then-up-and-comers (including Eric Bana, Brian Cox, Diane Kruger, Orlando Bloom, Rose Byrne, Peter O’Toole, and Julie Christie), the movie was sold largely glistening prime Pitt, a decade after his breakthrough year of 1994. It became his biggest worldwide grosser ever, and it’s still eclipsed only by F1 and World War Z on that front. On a smaller level, Troy managed the fairly impressive feat of being a second-weekend-of-May movie that outperformed the much-hyped first-weekend-of-May movie, something that seems to happen mainly when Hugh Jackman makes something terrible (Van Helsing in 2004 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009). Troy was also, along with 300, one of the most successful sword-and-sandal-type epics in the wake of Gladiator (while still falling short of that film financially, critically, and awards-wise).

Moreover, 300, with its amped-up comic-book aesthetics and over-the-top machismo, became a frequent point of reference and inspired its own mini-wave of more fantastical quasi-historical action-adventures like Immortals and Gods of Egypt; not so much with Troy, though a substantially extended and more nudity-filled director’s cut of the latter did eventually appear. And while I’m loathe to bring something as vibes-based and annoying as movie quotes into it, but the bros do seem to quote 300 a lot more often than anyone imitates Pitt’s Achilles barking “Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!”

15 years later, Pitt had achieved a very movie-star form of immortality, while maintainig mixed feelings about his embodiment of that in Troy, which he mentioned in an extensive New York Times Magazine interview about his career:

“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+