A moment of plagiarism...
Ladies and gents, we kick off the opening of this blog with a post that I plagiarised from
In principio erat Verbum Ην αρχη ην ο Λογος, a person with a passion for the Classics, and definitely one who has been very much riled by
Troy. OK, I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but this might be for those who are curious with regards to the accuracy of
Troy. Enjoy.
"Sir, your wife left ... with the Trojans."
Watched this film last night with a bunch of friends. At the end of it, I heard some girls going "Wah, you mean it's based on a book?". Lady Athena give me strength...
WARNING: Rant ahead. This one's LONG. I don't usually post ultra-long reviews of films like this, but being a Classicist, I've taken this desecration of Homer personally.
What do you get if you start with the first great narrative of Western civilization, then remove all the psychological complexity and profound characterization?
Troy
If you're someone to whom "Homer" means only the stupidest character on The Simpsons, this may not be off-putting. If you think the Bronze Age began when Brad Pitt's tanning bed was delivered, you may not care. And if you know Trojans only as impediments to procreation, Wolfgang Petersen's grandiose, hollow war film may seem like gold. The rest of us may wish he'd plunged head-first into Homer's wine-dark sea and stayed under.
This Iliad purist doesn't know where to start. Let's try starting with the time-frame. Writer David Benioff compressed 10 years of battle into 17 days (I counted) and ignored significant characters.
From the very beginning, where the historical preamble of text explaining the "background" gets shown, I started shifting in my seat. "Greeks and Trojans" they said. Now, even though in English we tend to think of the war as having been between Greeks and Trojans, here wasn't such thing as "Greece" in the times the Trojan Wars took place. "Greece" was a bunch of city-states, led by more or less independent kings: Sparta (Menelaus), Mycenae (Agamemnon), Ithaca (Odysseus), Phthia (Achilles) etc... Those people, by the way, called themselves Achaeans most of the time, and that's what Homer calls them. "Greeks" doesn't appear in the Iliad at all. Agamemnon neither conquered nor unifed Greece. Greece was still a collection of loosely allied kingdoms at the time of the Trojan War. The Greek kings fought to get Helen back because they had all wanted to marry her and pledged each other that they would defend the one who won her hand against any tried to take her away, not because they owed Agamemnon fealty.
First the men. The cast's Achilles heel is its Achilles, who ought to be a heel: arrogant, lazy, stubborn, cruel, deceitful and foolish. Homer created Western literature's first anti-hero in this demigod, upon whom the Greeks' hopes rest despite his long reluctance to fight Trojans. Pitt turns him into a simple, sullen rebel against Greek leader Agamemnon, a generically stolid warrior who wonders in the best tradition of the 20th century crap: "What's all the killing for?" He comes to life only in sword-to-sword combat with Trojan prince Hector (an excellent Eric Bana). The rest of the time, even in bed with the captive Briseis, this Achilles is as wooden as the Trojan horse. Achilles also declines to join his friend Patroclus in bed. Patroclus is his "beloved cousin" rather than, as Shakespeare so piquantly put it, "his masculine whore." And, just to dispel that expectation from the start, our very first view of Achilles finds him in bed with TWO babes. When Achilles bedded Briseis, my friend Anthony very evilly commented, "I hope he's using a Trojan!"
Stupid filmmakers have changed the key to Patroclus' death - in the Iliad, Achilles tells Patroclus to lead the Myrmidons, and is thus responsible for his lover's death. A pity Hollywood didn't have the guts to show Achilles' bisexuality. Would Pitt's female fans still have come to watch a near-naked Brad Pitt getting it on with some guy? Sure, why not? It's not like he's ever going to get it on with most of them anyway. I'll be posting about the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus soon - I'll reread the Iliad and come up with some ideas.
Is it my imagination or is Pitt's designer leather skirt about four inches shorter than everyone else's? Pitt also poses his way through the film. He preens, he prances and he pouts. And when he summons his men in to battle it is with an accent that knows no location on earth. It has a tinge of the British in it so maybe that is where he was aiming. But he doesn't hit that target. His cry outside the walls of Troy - "Heck-tah! HECK-TAH!" sounded like a "can Hector come out and play, Mr Priam?".
No wonder Hector didn't look too worried.
Achilles, who has a strange combination of nearly Matrix-like powers, utter ruthlessness and male lovers in the original poem, has been turned into "Fabio on the beach" in the guise of Pitt (who with a good script and more effort could have turned this into the most complex and original warrior figure Hollywood has ever produced). I must say though, he did look really good with his shirt off, especially the scene where he was conveniently covered in vaseline.
They've removed the importance of Shield Brothers and gotten rid of, surprise surprise, the importance Patroclus has in Achilles' rampage. No idea what I'm talking about? Patroclus and Achilles were lovers, or at the very least, the dearest of "bosom friends" and shield brothers.
At the root of the film's troubles is the Petersen's biggest miscalculation: leaving out the gods. Though the Gods are referred to obliquely, the film keeps them firmly out of sight and mind - the implication being that they aren't there at all. It's Homer as secular humanist. But the Gods are what make the Iliad so grand. To tell the story of Troy without the back story of the Judgment of Paris, for example -- in which the handsome prince is forced to pick between the goddesses Aphrodite, Hera and Athena by giving the most beautiful a golden apple -- is to suck the tale of its vigor. And when Paris challenges Helen's ex-husband, King Menelaus, to single combat and starts to lose, what a difference it makes for Paris to cower in terror and scurry away, as the film depicts, rather than have Aphrodite swoop down and spirit him away, as in Homer's version.
Lost in the translation is the vivacious, compelling tug of war between Gods and mortals. Sure, the Gods are immortal, but they miss out on the joy -- the excitement -- of being alive and knowing you have a finite time on this Earth. Homer's gods meddle, bicker, squabble and, in many ways, are less noble (and more fun) than the humans they try to push around. Even Homer's martial epic would best be subtitled, The Gods Must Be Crazy. In the Iliad, the Gods are a meddlesome bunch -- Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite and the rest are always zipping down from Olympus to butt into human affairs. Homer would've had no story without them. There would have been no Trojan War because Helen would never have been abducted. Achilles, the story's hero -- and the son of a Goddess -- would have never been born.
Benioff and Petersen made a fatal mistake by excising the gods, who are mentioned vaguely but never interfere with the action. One points of the Iliad is that fate and the immortals rule us, despite our attempts to assert free will; we must be righteous partly because the Gods may end our lives at any time. Hector is Achilles' equal in the Iliad, until the goddess Athena disguises herself as Hector's brother and betrays his trust.
It's vain Aphrodite, goddess of love, who gives the Spartan queen Helen to the Trojan prince Paris, as Helen's his reward for judging Aphrodite winner of a beauty contest.) This infuriates Helen's husband, Menelaus, who convinces his fellow kings of Greece to seek revenge. Without a sense of destiny and divine command behind them, Paris becomes a common seducer and Helen a cheap tart. (The smaller-than-life performances by Orlando Bloom and German actress Diane Kruger reinforce that impression.)
Oh, and what on earth is the temple of Apollo doing on the beach, outside the city walls? That's supposed to be the temple of Troy's patron god. What is this, San Apollo fuori-le-mure?
In just the first half hour of the film, most of the back-story of the Trojan War has been jettisoned. Gone is the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, where the shunning of Eris, the Goddess of Discord, sets the wheels of the Trojan War into motion. Gone are the twin prophets Cassandra and Helenus, who are the voices of reason of Troy. Gone is Hecuba (or Hecabe), the mother of Hector and Paris, who tries to stop her younger child from traveling to Sparta to act on his romantic impulses. Gone is Paris having been exiled from Troy at an early age, due to a prophecy he would lead to the downfall of Troy. Gone is the fact that Paris not only stole Menelaus' wife but much of his wealth as well. Gone is Menelaus calling upon all of Helen's old suitors, who made an oath long before that they would all back Helen's husband to defend her honour. Gone is Agamemnon having to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis (the twin sister of Apollo) in order to secure safe passage on the oceans to travel to Troy. Actually, much more of the story has been shuffled off, including a lengthy battle against the Teuthranians, whom the Greeks originally thought took Helen, since Menelaus was away at a funeral when Helen was squired away, but who needs all that rich texture when you only have 165 minutes to tell your story, and you wasted the first fifteen setting your hero up as the Grecian Fabio meets Han Solo?
Achilles never really gets a scratch on him even though he is in the thick of a battle full of spears and swords, never mind that he is not revealed to be the son of a Goddess or wearing armor forged by the Gods. He is only a mere mortal here. For anyone who read the poems or is familiar with the stories, there is too much missing.
THE MOST POIGNANT PART OF THE STORY WAS CHANGED! I'm talking about Book 6 where Hector says goodbye to his family... why oh why did they change that?! Go read the Iliad, and you'll see what I mean.
What's left? Not mythology, to be sure, but a rather bland sociology lecture on the realpolitik of power and the human waste of war. Now, such a contemporary sermon is well and good, but ancient Greece ain't the place to preach it. Also, there's carnage, accomplished over and over with the best computer-generated images money can buy. We're treated to at least four funeral pyres and countless scenes of slaughter, which achieve tension and emotional resonance only when a few great foes go one-on-one.
So they've removed the Gods and all hint of the supernatural, but it also includes a reference to Achilles' heel, which, in the absence of the gods, is merely a payoff with no setup. Traditionally, Achilles' prowess is the result of his mother dipping him in the river Styx's Invulnero-Water, since the water makes invincible whatever body part it touches; but since she held him by foot, his heel didn't get the treatment. Also, Paris is given a vision from Athena where she practically holds up a sign pointing to Achille's heel saying "AIM FOR THIS SPOT". Let's not forget Apollo, who's pretty pissed at the Achaeans for having violated his sanctuary and priests, guided the arrow of Paris to Achilles' heel.
Without that having been established, the crucial arrow to Achilles' heel makes us think, "Right. The heel. I remember that. What exactly was it about?" The scene's inclusion is therefore a stupid loose thread left dangling after the story was trimmed and re-hemmed, and his thrashing around when he is hit in his hamstring with an arrow after he has suffered far stronger blows to the rest of his body becomes almost comical.
And what the hell is Achilles doing taking part in the taking of Troy? He's dead LONG before that happens in Homer.
Anthony pointed out quite correctly that the Iliad is about Gods and heroes. This film has humanised the heroes and eliminated the Gods. Epic is about heroes, not humans. It's perhaps unfair to expect contemporary Hollywood moviemakers to do justice to Homer or the legends of the Trojan War that have inspired artists and writers through the centuries. It is definitely unfair to expect Hollywood moviemakers to be comfortable with any notion of honour, even though the behavior of classical heroes like Achilles and Hector is inexplicable without it. However,
Troy goes to the other extreme: Belief in the Gods is shown to be absurd, and whenever a character invokes them, he is making a ludicrous mistake.
As a result, the film lacks any sense of fate, destiny or even why this war's heroes should be memorable.
Troy takes all the wind out of Homer's sails. This is an epic made by a modernist who doesn't believe in epics. Doesn't believe in the honour of battle, or the status of a tragic hero, or the ideal of romantic love, or the dictates of an omnipotent god.
It's OK to create a political explanation for the Greek expedition, making punishment for Helen's abduction a convenient cover story for Agamemnon's imperial ambitions. But without honour as a primary concern, Achilles' fury at Agamemnon for taking away his lawful prize, the priestess Briseis, doesn't really make any sense.
There's a movingly human scene in the Iliad, one of the most beautiful and noblest scenes from the poemin which Glaucus and Diomedes stop fighting to exchange their armours as a gesture to the ties of hospitality that binds the two. Homer considered Diomedes so important that an entire book of the Iliad is dedicated to him. Unfortunately that scene is absent because they've completely eliminated Diomedes and regal warrior Aeneas does only marginally better - here he's a Trojan teen in a toga who speaks one line. Agamemnon (Brian Cox) sniggers that the foolish Helen has "proved to be very useful" — and he must have fought the urge to stroke his beard like Ming the Merciless. His pettiness cheapens the character's shrewd intelligence. Cox goes so over-the-top as a thoroughly evil Agamemnon that you wonder if he isn't deliberately sabotaging the movie. His performance raises an interesting question: Which is harder to watch, a talented actor giving a performance way below his game, or a really dreadful actor demonstrating for all time his utter lack of talent?
If
Troy doesn't put an end to the movie career of Orlando Bloom, there is no justice in movieland. Could somebody remind Bloom that we are in the Homeric Age - not Middle Earth - when using the Bow he morphed into Legolas. All I needed was a Cave Troll to come up and smite the Greeks. After he kills Achilles with an arrow, I was half expecting a voice from below to shout, "that still only counts as one!". Please, Bloom... change professions. You should not be allowed to act, legally. I am amused by the thought that teenage girls might actually buy a copy of the Iliad, perhaps hoping to find an insert with pictures of him. There was that bit when Paris and King Priam are looking at the Horse (it's hideous) left behind by the Greeks, and Bloom comments "burn it, father". I couldn't help thinking "Oh, he HAS to be gay... he has taste".
Sean Bean makes a canny and trustworthy Odysseus of Sparta, although even Cecil B. DeMille himself might have resisted the scene in which the character sees a soldier carving a wooden toy horse and -- say! -- the light bulb goes on over his head. And Australian actor Eric Bana thoroughly atones for last summer's
The Hulk with his performance as Hector, Paris's older brother and the most capable and most tragic figure in the entire saga.
The first major battle sequence, with Achilles and his hand-picked Myrmidons storming the Trojan beach, might be exciting if it weren't a flagrant carbon copy of the D-Day opener in
Saving Private Ryan. The final scenes, with Achilles searching the dying Troy for Briseis, suggest
Titanic. The large-scale battle scenes are impressive, but they suffer by comparison to those in
Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson has made it pretty difficult for directors of epic movies for the forseeable future). Then there's that scene where the Trojans set ablaze giant orbs of thatch and bowl them straight at the massed enemy. Scary it isn't, but you sure do want to sing along: Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire!
Now the women. Diane Kruger's Helen. Ha. She's pretty in a sort of Californian High-School way, but no way would she be a woman for whom a thousand ships were launched. In the Iliad, it says when Helen is in Troy, two old guards catch sight of her and say "it is no shame that men should fight and die for such a beauty as this". I can't imagine that happening with Kruger, who seems to have wandered in from the next-door audition for Eastern European Bond girls.
I read somewhere Catherine Zeta-Jones was a possibility for Helen, and I can imagine a LOT more ships being launched for her. However, Bloom had already been cast as Paris and she would've looked too old for his consort. Pity.
The movie's real erotic object is Pitt's Achilles, really. Just look at the number of times he slowly undresses and washes his body.
They've eliminated Cassandra the priestess. Cassandra was given her powers of prophecy by Apollo, who wanted to gain her favour, but after getting her powers she rejected him. Instead of taking back the powers, he cursed her to never have anyone believe her prophecies. When Hecabe was pregnant with Paris, she had a dream that she gave birth to a flame that destroyed Troy. Cassandra said that the child would destroy the kingdom and he should die. However, the dream was interpreted by someone else the same way, and Paris was taken to a mountain top and left to die of exposure. He was found instead, and raised as a shepherd. Later, when he came back to Troy, Cassandra recognised him and again warned them that he would bring the death of the kingdom. She attacked Helen upon arrival, again warning everyone, and again being unbelieved.
At the end of the Trojan War, she warned the King that there was an army inside the wooden horse, but no one believed her then either, the one with the gift of foresight. She knows what is going to happen, and that is why she tells the Trojans "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts". It's one of the key lines of the Iliad. POOF. Disappeared without a trace. During the sacking of Troy, she was captured by Ajax in the temple of Athena and raped, but since Ajax has been killed by Hector in the film...
Where is Hecuba, the Queen of Troy? They seem to have misplaced Priam's 48 other sons and all 50 of his daughters. I understand that it would be extremely difficult to have them all, but they left out such key Trojan royals as Deiphobus, Polyxena and Cassandra. As I said, I understand leaving these characters for the sake of it being a complex story, but they're not even mentioned.
Helen. Helen was not sent to Sparta to marry Menelaus, she was the daughter of Leda and Tyndareus (previous king and queen of Sparta), her real father was Zeus which explained her beauty. She chose to marry Menelaus out of all the suitors in Greece and the alliance was made upon the suggestion of Odysseus that the suitors agree to join together and stand behind her choosen husband if his right to Helen is challenged .
Briseis? Briseis was not a cousin to the royal family nor was she a priestess of Apollo. Briseis was the wife of King Mynes of Lyrnessus, which was an ally of Troy's. According to mythology, Achilles sacked Lyrnessus, killing Briseis' husband and her three brothers. Achilles then took her as his prize, making her his concubine. He fell in love with her, and during the tenth year of the Trojan war, Agamemnon decimated Thebes, taking Chryseis, the daughter of a priest of Apollo. Apollo got pissed when Agamemnon refused to give her back, and "came down from Olympus darker than night, though he is known as the 'bright one'; and shooting his golden arrows at the Achaean camp, he caused a plague that decimated the army."
Agamemnon was told by Calchas (the same prophet that told him to sacrifice his daughter) that the plague was created by Apollo's wrath over the pain of his priest. Agamemnon agreed to give back Chyrseis as long as another prize was provided to replace her. Achilles, hearing this ridiculed Agamemnon, calling him a schemer, and to punish him for this, Agamemenon took Briseis from Achilles. That is why Achilles refused to fight anymore until Patroclus was killed by Hector.
They've elevated Briseis' existence from chattel (and minor sub-point) to Trojan royalty and a love story. (For goddsakes! A love story!) I am so sick of stories of women who are enslaved and then fall in love with their captors/rapists/enslavers! Hello, where are all those nutty left-wing liberals and feminists when you need them?
They have Briseis kill Agamemnon. Unbelievable. Oresteia, anyone? Hello? Clytemnestra - are you listening? 'Cos if you are, you're going to be really happy... you don't have to kill your husband anymore! Your son doesn't have to come back to kill you anymore! Of all the wrecking of the myth, this is the WORST. This is SACRILEGE. The very idea that Hollywood could so alter one of the greatest tales ever told to say that anyone but Clytemnestra killed Agamemnon is, to use an apt Greek word, hubris. It's disgusting. The point that Agamemnon goes home to be killed by his wife Clytemnestra is the basis of the Oresteia - the cornerstone of Western Drama. Benioff might as well make a giant 40 foot robot come in and kill him because, well, if he can change important events in the poem such as the DEATH OF THE KING OF THE MYCENAEANS, then adding a 40 foot robot bent on destruction shouldn't be a problem at all.
For such a high budget production, you would think they could have afforded to have Chryseis, Cassandra, and Briseis... WITHOUT bunging them together into one unlikely character! Briseis killed Agamemnon? No problem! She can stand-in for Clytaemnestra, after all, Briseis' character was standing in for virtually every female in the Iliad. The film's entire female cast is basically just an elaborate background tool set up so that the men have a distraction when the battles have died down. This treatment of the women and the elimination of the homosexual love between Achilles and Patroclus makes the film the worst sort of Hollywood heterosexist whitewash imaginable.
I must remember this if I ever become a Classics teacher and give a test on the Iliad or Greek Mythology. I shall make sure to ask questions whose answers are very different in the book and flick - that way we'll see who did the reading! "How does Agamemnon die?" (trick question)! That'll teach'em to read the text! No, he is not killed by Briseis!
What the movie doesn't explain is why Helen would leave with Paris after an acquaintanceship of a few nights. Is it because her loins throb with passion for a hero? No, because she tells him: "I don't want a hero. I want a man I can grow old with." Not in Greek myth, you don't. If you believe Helen of Troy could actually tell Paris anything remotely like that, you will probably also agree that the second night he slipped into her boudoir, she told him, "Last night was a mistake."
Hector tells Paris how he remembered when Paris was 10 years old. Hello... Wasn't Paris abandoned at Mount Ida, raised by a shepherd and later returned to Troy as prince?
Ajax was not killed by Hector, instead Ajax wounded Hector without sustaining an injury. Later he and Odysseus made speeches to determine who among the two of them should get Achilles' armor, and Odysseus won, so Ajax started killing his own people too after going berserk, and later he comitted suicide.
What is this nonsense about "the sword of Troy"? Aeneas didn't carry out the sword of Troy, he carried his father, led his son, and carried the statue of Troy (a goddess figure) according to the Aeneid.
Patroclus was an accomplished warrior in his own right, not the untried boy presented in the movie. Patroclus, who looks a little like Achilles, wears his helmet and armor to fool the enemy, and until the helmet is removed everyone thinks that Achilles has been slain. So dramatic is that development that the movie shows perhaps 100,000 men in hand-to-hand combat, and then completely forgets them in order to focus on the Patroclus battle scene, with everybody standing around like during a fight on the playground.
Menelaus? He's supposed to survive the Trojan War and get back to Sparta promptly, where ten years years later he tells Telemachus all about his father (Odysseus). He is not supposed to die on the second day of the war.
By treating Achilles and the other characters as if they were human, instead of the larger-than-life creations of Greek myth, director Wolfgang Petersen miscalculates. What happens in Greek myth cannot happen between psychologically plausible characters. That's the whole point of myth. Great films like Michael Cacoyannis'
Elektra, about the murder of Agamemnon after the Trojan War, know that and use a stark dramatic approach that is deliberately stylized. Of course,
Elektra wouldn't work for a multiplex audience, but then maybe it shouldn't.
Then we've got the Trojan Horse itself. It's a monstrous thing, hammered together out of ship planks, and painted a menacing black. Why anyone would bother hauling it home beats me. In Homer, the soothsayer of Trojans tried to warn King Priam that the horse was a danger but Poseidon sent his sea serpant to silence him, unlike the film where the soothsayer/priest was encouraging Priam to bring the horse into the city. Also would it have killed them to be a bit faithful to the script and show the horse so large that the Trojans had to demolish part of their city walls in order to bring the thing in?
Paris and Helen run off together at the end. I repeat - Paris and Helen run off together at the end. Excuse me? He's supposed to get mortally wounded and go crawling back to his first true love, the nymph Oenone on Mount Ida, whom he abandoned when Aphrodite promised him Helen. She has the power to heal him, but refuses to because he abandoned her. He dies right there and she is grief-stricken, etc. Paris hence dies long enough before the Greeks breach the city that Helen is married off to Deiphobus, another of Paris' brothers. I was looking forward to Paris dying. But turns out that the writers changed it...grrr. They kill Brad and Eric, but they can't kill Orlando. Were the writers afraid that a few million teen Orli fans were gonna hurt them or something?
Helen is supposed to go with Menelaus, but since they've already killed him, she might as well go with the cute one, right? Andromache is supposed to be dragged off into slavery. Astayanax (Hector's teenaged son) is supposed to be hurled from the walls of Troy by Neoptolemus, Achilles' son. Aeneas' son Ascanius doesn't seem to exist in this movie, and how could he if his father is like, 15? Homer has Menelaus come into the palace at Troy, intending to kill her. As he finds her, Helen bares her bosom, and the beautiful sight affects Menelaus so much that he forgives her everything and brings her home. Of course, in the film, Menelaus died at the hands of Hector, so that couldn't happen...
The really bizarre thing about the script was that despite the listed inaccuracies, there were several things that only those well-read in the Classics would understand. For example, Thetis' wandering around in the water for no real reason seems extraneous unless one understands that she was the daughter of a sea god. She also seems pointless unless one knows that it was her prophecy to Achilles that gave him the choice between a long life of obscurity and a short life of glory. Furthermore, at the end of the film, when several Trojans are fleeing to Mount Ida, Paris stops a teenage boy who is helping an old man to flee. Paris asks the boy what his name is, and he says "Aeneas."
Paris then hands him the "Sword of Troy", which as previously mentioned, if it is in the hands of a Trojan, Troy would never fall. Unless someone knows about the Aeneid, etc, they wouldn't get this reference, nor would they realise that the boy was basically carrying Anchises on his back. Never mind the actor playing Aeneas is actually 16, and therefore too young to be married to the eldest daughter of Priam and have a son. After all, do you really need Ascanius to rule Alba Longa for 30 years? Nah.
Imagine a movie based on the Bible without Christ, angels, or miracles. Or Lord of the Rings without magic or wizards. Imagine the Titanic taking its maiden voyage down to the French Riviera in late July, where the only ice to be seen for miles and miles were the ones the bartenders were putting into the drinks. Imagine Frodo and Sam reaching the Cracks of Doom in a week by taking a little known short cut that does not appear on any map of Middle-earth. That's about the level of change made in adapting the Iliad to the screen, and that is simply unacceptable. I can't figure out why they made so many of the changes they did. They're not little details by any means, and saying that it's not supposed to be the Iliad doesn't excuse the fact that the story goes against every source of myth related to the war, not just the Iliad.
"Don't look now, dudes, but there're, like, a thousand ships outside.
But never fear. The pecs of Troy -- um, princes of Troy -- are ready."
They also show plenty of male flesh. Granted, it was nice to see lots of splendid muscles from Pitt and Bana, but did Petersen really have to desecrate the Iliad in order to do that? Couldn't he have made a film about bodybuilders or competitive swimmers instead?
Adaptation of the Iliad? Perhaps rape would be more appropriate.
Some things that really got to me: the pronunciation of names. Yes, I understand that in Latin, Priam is pronounced Pree-ahm — that one I could accept, but they did some odd things with the other names: Briseis is now Bri-say-iss and Menelaus is now Meneh-louse.
MUSIC
Unmemorable. Horner, who's done fabulous work elsewhere, gives an eminently forgettable score here. It's one of those "we can tell the Greeks are about to appear because the music's changed and the drums have started" sort of soundtracks. Plus, epic films have epic soundtracks and themes.
Doctor Zhivago had "Laura's Theme", for example. If I'm not humming the theme or theme song as I leave the cinema, it's not an epic soundtrack. Way too much "aaAAAaaaaaAAAhhhh" music going on. Easily his worst soundtrack in 20 years.
SET & COSTUMES
Despite all the technology and GCI battle scenes, the biggest problem with
Troy is a simple filmmaking 101 blunder: If a period picture wants to seduce an audience into suspending disbelief, a director must create not just a physical world, but an emotional one as well. In recent flicks such as
The Last Samurai,
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, there's the sensation that we've happened upon a fully realised universe that was buzzing and thriving long before the camera crew stopped by. But for all his eye-popping set pieces,
Troy still feels phony. Everyone seems to have just shown up that morning- nothing about the landscape looks lived-in. The costumes are all shiny and brand-new, the actors even shinier and prettier. The armour everyone's wearing looks like they took it out of the plastic wrap right before they jumped off the ships - either that or polishing armour is part of the ritual of preparing for war (it's not).
Is it just me or does Achilles' armour look like it's from a mail-order fetish catalogue? According to the Iliad, his armour was forged by the great god Hephaestus. And with today's amazing special effects that are obviously available in Hollwood and used elsewhere in the film... it's not much to ask for the armor to LOOK somewhat impressive if not god-forged. The armour of the period is quite extensively described by Homer, bronze breastplates with silver and tin and enamel ornamentation, bronze greaves etc. The stuff they're wearing in the film looks like leather and moulded plastic. Of course they couldn't have their actors jumping around in heavy bronze breastplates because they're bloody heavy (those ancients were made of sterner stuff than our modern men) but they could have made an effort to make it look less cheap! After all, this film did have a budget of $200 million!
Which brings me to the costumes. I suspect they must have run out of money at this point (the film ended up wildly over-budget and over-schedule), because if you look closely, the nobles of Troy are all wearing tie-tyed cotton fabrics in white and blue. One can even spot where the knots and rubber bands were tied. Somebody please tell the costumer that bright blue and white tie-dye belongs in 70s California in hippie-settlements, not the world of Homer.
The Greek kings all look like old bikers. In fact, the Greeks look pretty much like every OTHER people trying really hard to look like Greeks. They're kind of a cross between Minoans, Medieval Europeans, and Vikings. It's a sad day indeed when the Greeks aren't Greek. One of the gang I watched the film with commented that the Greeks looked more like Dwarves from LOTR.
HISTORICAL DETAIL
There were more Greeks in one scene of
My Big Fat Greek Wedding than there are in the entirety of
Troy. In keeping with the Eisenhower era-style casting, the rank-and-file Greek army -- you know, the nameless barbarians who get brutally slaughtered -- has a few guys who look as if they might be of Italian or Middle Eastern descent. I read somewhere the extras were Bulgarians (rather pissed off at being paid $12 USD a day). What's the point of having some actors spout Greek in the big crowd scenes? I definitely heard a "Malista" somewhere.
The swords in the film are made of steel - and definitely not bronze. WHY IN ZEUS' NAME IS THERE IRON IN THE BRONZE AGE? There's a reason this age is called the BRONZE AGE - they didn't have iron or steel tools yet.
Further nitpick - why do all these sword dramas feel the need to have the sound effecty "kkkssssszzzing" when a sword is drawn from the scabbard? I've worked with all sorts of swords and NOT ONE ever makes that sort of sound.
I have to laugh at the celebration around the wooden horse. Of course, the Trojan women are doing a Mayim step (That's an ancient Hebrew dance step. Enough said) And of course, there was a random guy doing backflips. Ah, movie cliché #987.
What on earth were llamas doing running around the streets of Troy? I know they filmed in Mexico or something, but what are South American animals doing in a market place in Asia Minor in 1200 B.C.?
When praying, the characters of Troy are depicted as kneeling before the statues. They couldn't have had a historical or classical consultant on this film, as everyone knows the Ancient Greeks and Homeric heroes STOOD when they prayed - in the ancient "Orans" position of forearms raised, palms facing upwards when praying to the Olympians or palms down when praying to the Gods of the Underworld. They most certainly did not kneel.
While we're on the topic of religion in the film, in the scene when Hector and Paris return to Troy, as they're entering the great hall, one sees clergy milling about, presumably the priests of Apollo, who is patron of Troy. One knows they're meant to be clergy not because they're wearing funny clothes (pretty much everyone is in this film, aside from Pitt who seems to show more skin than clothes) but because they're wearing hats and holding golden staffs which are directly stolen from Greek Orthodox CHRISTIAN Bishops' vestments and regalia. The staffs they hold (called Pateritsa) are terminated by two serpents looking toward an orb surmounted by a cross - an example may be seen
here. The priests of Apollo are also wearing on their heads these tallish cylindrical hats covered with a black veil - they're called Kamilavka (Kalmilavkion in the singular) and are worn by Bishops, dignitaries and monks - a picture of a bishop wearing it and holding the serpent staff may be found
here.
What the hell, did they think Greek Orthodox = Greek Pagan?
THE SCRIPT
Oh, the script. Did director Wolfgang Petersen imagine that if his actors acted as though they were reciting Shakespeare, it would make the dialogue, which alternates among the pompous, the banal and the just plain dumb, sound like Shakespeare? When Paris, who's so gorgeous he could have played Helen, nuzzles the Spartan queen in her boudoir, she coos, "Last night was a mistake," just like any soap opera star.
"You must be Hector," says Achilles, on their first meeting. Ouch.
"Burn Troy Burn! Burn! Burn! Burn Troy to the ground!" screams Agamemnon during the sack of Troy. HA.
Benioff's script tries so hard to be high-flown and solemn that it ends up funny. The speech is hokey enough that hearing it once almost induces groans. Hearing it over and over and over again, as we do here, ensures groans. Enough with the immortality business, already! A lethal drinking game could be crafted from the number of times the script solemnly refers to "immortality", just as it could for the number of times that Pitt strikes a body-builder's pose as horns in the soundtrack adore him.
We also get countless speeches about how "the world will never forget this war/our glory/your bravery/the mighty sword of blah-blah-blah." If you took a drink each time someone said one, you'd be snockered halfway through. "Immortality, take it, it's yours!" Even our great warrior signs on. He sings a chorus of the pathetic blues (seems his Achilles heel is really just a bad case of angst), and then gives the sad song a positive spin: "The gods envy us. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed."
How can I take Achilles seriously after hearing him utter the line "It's too early in the day for killing princes"? That and the Rules of Epics, which require all critical death scenes to occur in Act 3. Bana's Hector has his moments, too. A couple of times, by the expression on his face, I thought he was going to go green, you know, Hulk out. "Hector Smash! Don't make Hector angry Achilles. You won't like him when he's angry." Orlando Bloom elicited a big laugh from me when he swept Helen into his arms and vowed "We'll live off the land. I'll kill deer and rabbits," or something to that effect. Though, I don't think it was supposed to be funny.
David Benioff's adaptation is laced with the dialogue of a angsty teenager who never studied the classical works. One of Agamemnon's men says "if we turn back now, we’ll lose all credibility". How about some poetry to the language?
REWRITE: "If we turn a blind face, the four winds will spread our cowardice to every corner of Greece."
That's a centuries-old epic I can buy, not crap like "I want to see my son grow old and have girls chasing him." The film needs "my eyes want to look upon my son, bathing in all the flavour that life has to offer," not "May the Gods be with you." That last line is not made up and one which even George Lucas would admit sucked.
Menelaus: "Where is she?"
Guard: "Sir, your wife left ... with the Trojans."
One would assume that a $200 million summer blockbuster could have found space on the payroll for some random lackey to comb the script and extricate any errant one-liners that could be potentially misconstrued as silly condom jokes by annoyed, impatient audiences. It calls to mind a quote from the estimable film critic Homer Simpson: "Your movie is more boring than church." I believe neither Homers would approve.
In an
interview, Benioff recently said,"This is the mother of all epics, the cornerstone of Western literature. If I screw it up, classicists around the world will issue a fatwa and assassinate me with bronze daggers." He'd better be borrowing Brad's protective armour then. If I were in the mafia, I would seriously start a vendetta against those who allowed this film to see the light.
Please just pretend like you read the Iliad before you make a screenplay. This goes beyond interpretation (read: O Brother Where Art Thou? Now that's an excellent interpretation of the Odyssey!), this whole movie entered in to Classics heresy. The whole "inspired by" is nonsense. We wouldn't have people giving that argument if the story was of a character whose name was Jesus Christ, who was from Nazareth, parents were Mary and Joseph and instead of being crucified, instead he was whisked away by a gang of robbers, and he ends up becoming an alcoholic, womanizer and a gang leader and comes back and destroys the Roman Civilisation. A director could easily put a disclaimer at the end saying "Inspired by the Life of Jesus Christ", but we all know what would happen then.
But yet, respected Classicist Mary Beard says:
Among those of us [professional classicists] who look on, a few will be curmudgeonly carping at inaccuracies or misrepresentations of the original. The majority will welcome the publicity for their subject. Many (myself included, I should confess) will already be penning articles on the "Pittian Moment In the Reception of The Iliad" or devising new courses on "Classics in Film" or "The Trojan War in Popular Culture". The chances are that
Troy will have a longer life in a university department near you than in your local multiplex."
And ironically, she's right.
If they had done a good job, I perhaps could have had a sequel to look foward to. Now I fear it. The only good sign I saw in the whole bloody film was that they killed enough main characters (in the wrong way), that perchance they can't attempt to ruin my beloved Odyssey, Aeneid and Oresteia, right? Plus, no Gods and monsters means the Odyssey and Oresteia can't be made by them right? Oh Zeus. I hope so.
If you really want to experience
Troy as it should be, go out and get a translation (I recommend Lattimore or Lombardo's versions), and read it for yourself. Better yet, learn Homeric Greek and read the original. If you want to actually see it... might as well wait for the rentals to come out (if I ever buy this on DVD it'll be as a comedy). If you want to see really hot men go naked (forgot how many times I almost jumped at the screen seeing Brad Pitt and Bana), then by ALL means, do go and watch it. As for the $200 million spent... all down the drain. If you want to see a comedic adaptation of Iliad without being too offended, then gooo ahead and watch. I thought the movie was hilarious. It shouldn't have been, but it was. Every time they screwed up, I just burst out laughing. Especially at Bloom's Paris . Because honestly...
In the Odyssey, Homer calls Odysseus
"one who in time past had suffered many griefs at heart in passing through wars of men and the grievous waves; but now he slept in peace, forgetful of all that he had suffered." (Odyssey, 13.90)
Now, taking a cue from Odysseus, I'm going to have a nap. Hopefully when I get up, I won't be so angry.
Ivan's comments: WHOAH...
Personally, I think that there are too many stupid people who are being allowed to breed. It's about time that we, the self-proclaimed intellectual elite, step in to stop this abject wasting away of the human brain. 
).
