Troy

May 24th, 2004 by jk | Filed under Books & Movies.

Saw the movie Troy last night. This movie is a lesson to all young men and women who fall in love. The lesson is that if the young woman happens to be the wife of another person, who is the king of another country, then there will be a war and everyone will be killed except the two people who fell in love and started the war. The other lesson is that you will have to wear a skirt, even if you are Brad Pitt.

The movie is what the industry likes to call, “A Major Motion Picture”, which means, lot of extras get killed. Brad Pitt stars as Achilles and it was believable. The rest of characters, Paris, Helen, Agamemnon were not properly defined. I am comparing this against the Gladiator, where even Commodus as a well defined person. Here you get to know Achilles very well (he walks naked, sleeps naked even when there is war going on) and no one else.

Troy’s Fallen is the movie review from Archaeology Magazine, which points out many archaeological mistakes as well as changes from the orignal.

Clearly Homer had the story of the Trojan War wrong and it had to be rewritten, to judge by changes (I can’t say improvements) this movie makes. Homer says it took ten years, but here it is three weeks with the famous quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles taking place on day one. Hektor kills Menelaos and Ajax on day two of the war (Homer’s having Menelaos surviving the war and returning to live happily in Sparta with Helen is awkward, and the suicide of Ajax isn’t really needed for this movie). On the night of day two, the Trojans unleash their secret weapon: Great Balls of Fire! Day three, Hektor is such a good guy that after he kills Patroklos, the young protege of Achilles, he suggests everybody knock off for the rest of the day. By the end of day four, Achilles kills Hektor and Priam can come and beg for his son’s body. Where Homer took more than nine years, the film gets it all done in just four days. For the grand finale, the filmmakers aren’t satisfied with just the horse and the sack of Troy. In the epics, Achilles is dead and gone by the time the wooden horse is built, but here he is still alive so he can search for his love interest, Briseis. Attacked by Agamemnon, Briseis kills him (never mind the ancient tale of Agamemnon returning to Greece to be killed by his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra and then be avenged by his children Orestes and Electra). Paris then shoots Achilles with arrows (five or six, I lost count) before scampering off with his love interest, Helen, to live the simple life somewhere–maybe subsisting on nuts and twigs on the slopes of Mount Ida. That’s right! Helen and Paris get to run away! Homer had it wrong!

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