Cinema of Swords
A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)
By Lawrence Ellsworth
Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to the Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.
This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.
If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, do us both a favor and ask about it wherever you do your book shopping.)
Xiphos and Bucephalus (Five Times Fast)
Hollywood is famously risk-averse, preferring familiarity over innovation, which is why even long-dead cinematic genres are regularly unearthed and reanimated in attempts to recapture their former, highly profitable glory. This happens like clockwork every few years with the once-mighty Western, putting cowboys once again tall in the saddle, usually with dire results. In 2004 it was the turn of sword-and-sandal films, classical warfare in the time of Ancient Greece. The year saw us gifted with two unexpected epics reviving the genre, movies that could not have been more different from each other except in their ambitious scale.
(Oh, a xiphos was the bronze short sword used as a side weapon by Greek-era soldiers, while Bucephalus, of course, was Alexander’s famously heroic horse.)
Troy
Rating: ****
Origin: USA/UK/Mexico/Malta, 2004
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Source: Warner Bros. DVD
Troy is a sprawling ancient warfare melodrama from writer David Benioff (Game of Thrones) and director Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot), so it’s a slick and professional piece of entertainment, albeit neither deep nor emotionally engaging. Still, it’s well-cast, well-told, and will hold your attention from beginning to end. It compresses the ten-year Siege of Troy into a seeming span of about three weeks—but hey, if I was adapting Homer’s Iliad for the screen, I’d have done the same thing.
All the beats of the classic story are covered: For love, Paris (Orlando Bloom), the younger Prince of Troy, carries off Helen (Diane Kruger), the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta (Brendan Gleeson). This gives Menelaus’ cruel and ambitious brother Agamemnon (Brian Cox), the over-king of Greece, the excuse he needs to attack and sack Troy. Calling on his vassal kings, he launches an invasion fleet of a thousand ships, a force that includes the hero Odysseus (Sean Bean, his signature smirk put to good use as the tricksy King of Ithaca), and most importantly Achilles (Brad Pitt), a warrior who’s a killing machine of supernatural skill.
On the other side, Troy is defended by Crown Prince Hector (Eric Bana), another warrior of renown and the son of King Priam, played by the wonderful Peter O’Toole in one of his last major roles. Priam is proud and overconfident, and relies on the prowess of Hector and the favor of the gods for victory over the invading Greeks. Things don’t go the way Priam expects.
The actors mostly acquit themselves well with their rather shallow roles, especially Eric Bana as the decent and honorable Hector, Cox as the villainous Agamemnon, and Bloom as the callow and spoiled pretty-boy Paris. The weak link here is Pitt as Achilles, and the problem is twofold. First, writer Benioff chose to cast Achilles, a sullen murderer, as the hero of the film, which means making him redeemable and giving him an arc of emotional character development. But Pitt, though well up to managing the action hero aspects of the role, is out of his depth when faced with having to show dawning love for the captive Briseis (Rose Byrne) and deep for the death of his cousin Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund). Pitt is over his head here, especially when sharing scenes with first-rate actors like O’Toole and Cox. Too bad.
As for the Trojan War itself, the battles are conveyed clearly enough, though they lack the impact of those in, for example, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, released in the same year. The single combats and small unit actions come off better, especially the savage climactic duel between Hector and Achilles. There’s nothing particularly striking about the visuals in this film, but everything looks well enough and the direction is unobtrusive (which one can’t say about Stone’s Alexander). Many fans of Homer’s original were outraged by changes to the story’s ending, but they seem warranted to provide satisfying outcomes for the film’s more sympathetic characters.
In short, what we have here is good solid entertainment, though as soon as the credits roll you begin to forget it. Worth watching once for sure, but a rewatch won’t reveal any nuances you didn’t see the first time around.
Alexander
Rating: * (story) / **** (battle scenes)
Origin: Germany/France/Italy/Netherlands/UK/USA, 2004
Director: Oliver Stone
Source: Warner Bros. DVD
I wouldn’t go so far as to call this film batshit crazy, but it’s certainly bloated, overindulgent, unhinged, nigh schizophrenic, and desperate for attention—much like the character of Alexander the Great, at least as depicted here by co-writer and director Oliver Stone. Nonetheless, there’s no denying that this film has its points.
Ostensibly an epic biopic of the young Macedonian conqueror who spread Hellenistic culture across the Middle East and into southwestern Asia at the point of a pike, it starts with a delirious death scene right out of Citizen Kane. Then, abruptly, it flashes back to Alexander as a child in the royal household of King Philip II (Val Kilmer) and Queen Olympias (Angelina Jolie). It’s frantic scene that hints at the bizarrerie to follow, before cutting ahead to the adult Alexander (Colin Farrell) as a general, commanding his army against the Persians at the Battle of Gaugamela.
That clash of armies in the desert is well told and coherently shown from both ground level and aerial views, as Alexander leads his smaller but tightly disciplined force of pike phalanx and cavalry against the vast enveloping mass of King Darius’ Persian troops. It’s a compelling depiction of warfare in the 4th century BCE, mass slaughter, quick and terrible; the worst thing you can say about it is that Stone employs the dreaded close-up shaky-cam method to give the fight a chaotic urgency. By the end of the battle, Alexander’s victory has established his cred as both general and king, a charismatic commander who leads his troops from the front.
And it’s a good thing it does, because the battle is followed by endless talk that refers to further conquests but don’t bother to show any of them, instead giving us scene after tiresome scene of bombastic speechifyin’. Nobody converses in this movie, they just orate, speaking past each other in theatrical declamation, often shouting as if onstage and trying to project to the cheap seats in the balcony—while the camera is right in their faces.
The film spends two solid hours trying to tell the story of Alexander’s years of eastward conquest by presenting us with an ever-changing array of angry generals, bearded Macedonians who are indistinguishable from each other because their only attribute is anger. Everybody’s seething all the time, and there are conspiracies and betrayals, often explained by intrusive historical narration from 40 years later by the aged Ptolemy of Alexandria (Anthony Hopkins), who along with dotted-line arrows on a map keeps us apprised of all the battles we’re missing. From the fall of Babylon onward, there are endless drunken revels in which everyone is furious and furiously overacting. All those angry generals make Alexander sad, so he retreats to his tent and his lovers Hephaestion (Jared Leto) and Bagoas (Francisco Bosch), where he drinks too much. And then we’re sad too, because this always triggers another flashback to Al’s youth, another fragmentary attempt to explain why he’s driven to conquer.
So, why did Al the Great conquer the known world? Because apparently Great Al had the most messed-up parents since Œdipus and Medea, their royal and mythic predecessors, referred to repeatedly so you won’t miss the connection. Mom Olympias is a narcissistic sociopath, Pop Philip is a cruel and brutal drunk, and poor, confused young Al can’t satisfy either of them no matter what he does. So, when King Phil is assassinated and Al ascends the throne, he ups sticks and gets the hell out of Dodge, marching off eastward with the combined Greek and Macedonian army and never looking back (except through those incessant and ever-crazier flashbacks).
Stone portrays Alexander, not as a visionary, but as someone desperately seeking a vision, and the farther east he goes the weirder he (and this film) gets. Narrator Ptolemy tries to help but just makes things worse—at one point, he states that Al makes “his strangest decision” by deciding to marry the mountain princess Roxana, who is played by Rosario Dawson, and tell me, in what way is desiring Rosario Dawson a strange decision? The marriage serves to add yet more jealousies and anger into Al’s entourage, and soon everyone is wearing dark eye makeup and there’s a lot of what used to be called “exotic dancing.” Oh, no, decadence!
It's a relief when the army marches across the Hindu Kush and into the jungles of northern India for, at last, another onscreen clash, this one the Battle of Hydaspes. But this is no Gaugamela, for the wild weirdness of the furies and flashbacks has now infected even the depiction of warfare. The fight, against an Indian army bolstered by armored war elephants, becomes a hallucinogenic phantasmagoria as Alexander, out of his head, leads his pike and cavalry against opponents who finally have his number. The savage battle against the elephants is unforgettable, a mind-blowing spectacle unlike anything else in western cinema. When Al is badly wounded, the Macedonians rally around him and manage to win the battle, but their eastward march is finally over.
Don’t worry, though, there’s still another 45 minutes to follow of angst, anger, and yet more flashbacks as Stone struggles to deliver some kind of moral to his joyless and supremely self-important story. But old Ptolemy, maundering away in his rooftop garden in Alexandria, once more fails to help, giving Alexander’s career of conquest three different and entirely contradictory interpretations, leaving it up to the viewer to decide. Thanks for nothing, Ptol! And then we’re back where we started, in Babylon at Alexander’s delirious death scene, where we never even find out who Rosebud was.
(You know what, though? I’ll watch it all again.)
Next Week: The Underside of Fantasy, with The Scorpion King and Earthsea. Don’t miss it!
About Lawrence Ellsworth
Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.
My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Book 8, Shadow of the Bastille, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform, and Book 9, The Man in the Iron Mask, is forthcoming. Check out the series at musketeerscycle.substack.com.
As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late 1970s working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the ‘80s and then online role-playing games in the ‘90s. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and recently I returned to D&D as Principal Narrative Designer for Larian Studios’ smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3.
I was surprised to find that I liked TROY much more than I'd expected to, when I finally got around to seeing it (on DVD, I skipped the theatrical run). Worth noting -- there is a much expanded director's cut available on home video that is preferable to the original theatrical cut. If you enjoy the movie at all. Rose Byrne's earthy Briseis is cuter than ice-queen Helen if you ask me, but that's subjective.
I tried ALEXANDER twice over the years (and the expanded director's cut, too) and could barely stand to get thru it both times. Appalling dreadful waste of subject matter, in my view.