Troy was silly (spoilers)

Cafe Society
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Unboxed spoilers, too, because I don’t know how to use the boxes. So, if you ain’t seen it and are gonna, don’t scroll down. Anyway, here’s what was dumb about Troy.

-So, how, exactly, does Agamemnon raise, equip, provision, and mobilize (AND find enough triremes for) an army of forty thousandish in less time than it takes one ship to sail to Sparta?
-By the same token, what the hell was with the token force on the beaches? Either you defend your beaches or you don’t. You don’t just sacrifice a couple hundred men…
-Is it coincidence that Bradchilles is the only beardless guy in the movie who doesn’t get his ass handed to him?
-Was there any particular reason why they didn’t just surround the city instead of politely keeping beachside?

That’s really all I got. There were certain parts I really liked, such as the lack of explanation of things that viewers should really have known (the whole Achilles’ heel thing, for example- I was extremely worried about possible dumbing down); I’m about 98% certain that I’m the only person who was in the 450-seat theater we saw it in who understood the significance of Paris handing the sword to Aeneas and saying “find a new home for the Trojans” (the Aeneid is the fanciful story of how Aeneas leads the survivors of Troy through various adventures until they fetch up around what would become Rome)…

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Well, I noticed right off that the rowers were pulling (like we do these days) instead of pushing (as I believe the Greeks did until much later). And the giant balls of twine were really amusing. The girl that got swept off her feet and stolen away to Troy wasn’t nearly pretty enough to be launching 1,000 ships for–although sitting in the very front row may have affected my perception. I was looking up her nose the whole time. Orlando Bloom would have made a great Helen, but the screenwriter had trouble putting anything that sounded like courage in Paris’ mouth. Mostly because he was an amazingly convincing girlie-boy coward for most of the film.

Oh yeah. And then there was that one guy who kept going on and on about wanting to make sure they remembered his name. “Thousands of years from now, people will remember me!” And he got shot through the FOOT! “Blah blah, someday I’ll be more famouser than Brad Pitt!” He survives a hojillion sword fights to get shot through that one tendon on his foot? What in blazes was his name again?

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I’m confused by your complaint.

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My favorite was when they just decided there was enough killing for the day and the fighting stopped. Is this in The Illiad?

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It’s like this:::: [keyword] text [/keyword][/spoiler]

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Posted by Jurph:

I hope I’m being whooshed, and you’re only making a pretense of the kind of ignorance that causes people to make fun of Americans. I suspect I am.

The movie took a bunch from the Illiad, a little from the Odyssey, a little from the Aenid, smushed them together and rubbed Brad Pitt all over it. Given that, I’m not as inclined to nitpick points of logic as I would be with most movies.

Note, though, that the Greek invasion (in this version) had nothing to do with Helen’s level of attractiveness (except inasmuch as she attracted Paris enough for him to steal her away). Her husband, King Menelaus, wants her back because of his pride, and his brother, King Agamemnon, is happy to use this as an excuse for trying to conquer Troy and gain control of the whole of the Aegean.

(Although it has been proposed that there be a unit of measurement called a “millihelen”, which is the amount of feminine pulchritude sufficient to launch one ship.)

Personally, I enjoyed the movie as spectacle, although I would have been happier if: 1) they had made it clear that the siege of Troy lasted ten years; and 2) Paris ended up properly dead. As an SCA guy, I enjoyed seeing a proper shield wall in the battle scenes.

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Oh, I meant to add – those weren’t triremes.

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Are you going to elaborate on that? If they weren’t triremes, were they Volvos? Dinghies? Seaplanes? Dromans? Galleys?

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I can only speak for what I read in the Iliad and Odyssey, but these are my sketchy thoughts on what the movie made better and worse.

Things that the movie messed up:

a) Trivialising the Gods: The general audience probably wouldn’t have liked this, but the Gods explain a whole lot of things. The turn of the battle does not work without them, as was evidenced by the laughter from the audience when the Trojans retreated for no reason. It would have been neat (but a strain on the CGI budget) to see the likes of Athene racing down from Mt. Olympus to whip Odysseus out of trouble. As would the whole interplay between Zeus and Hera, and the god’s reaction to the Greek wall.

b) Where was Diomedes? Teucer? The Ajaxes? I suspect the guy with the mace was supposed to be one of the Ajax’s, but is he referred to be name? Diomedes and Teucer have huge roles in maintaining the battle while Achilles is absent, and though I realise that the film telescoped the whole affair, they deserve a mention at least. Diomedes is practically Hector’s Greek equivalent for a good part of the story.

c) Killing Melenaus and Agamemnon. You don’t just kill these guys… I admit that Homer’s reluctance to kill any of his heroes was a bit extreme, but why not pick somebody who doesn’t have a role in the Odyssey? At any rate, Agamemnon’s real fate is much more appropriate.

d) The importance of being remembered: The Iliad did not present this message anywhere near as prominently, and its addition changed Achilles from someone who can’t control his emotions to an arrogant fame seeker.

Things the movie improved on:

a) Speeding things up. In the Iliad, they’ve been waiting outside the city for 10 years before they attack. This is plainly ridiculous, and I don’t think Homer even found a convincing explanation for it. Maybe the movie made the attack a little too rapid, but it makes for a better story.

b) No river chasing Achilles. This really did not work in the Iliad, and it was another problem that was feebly solved by a God. Good riddance.

c) The funeral games: Again, this added nothing to the story of the Iliad whatsoever other than giving the heroes another opportunity to congratulate themselves.

d) The love stories. The Iliad is a bit too barren when it comes to relationships. Helen appears to have no say in her predicament whatsoever, and it actually seems she was kidnapped. It was nice to give her a voice, and Achilles’ girl (forgot the name) did a good job of filling the void left by the gods. The romance of course, also makes for a much fuller ‘epic’.

e) The death of Hector. The way Achilles does this in the book is pathetic. A goddess, Athene, comes down and tricks Hector so that Achilles may kill him. The fight in front of Ilium’s walls is better representative of their characters, and it seems like something Homer would do.

f) Paris running away from Melenaus was far better for his character development than having Apollo whisk him to safety.

g) The line “That is why nobody will remember you.”. That was classic – way to crush a kid’s dreams, Achilles.

I apologise for anything that I’ve got wrong, for my attention did have a habit of slipping during both the book and movie.

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I dunno, I liked the movie a lot. No, really, a lot. And I’m a big fan of The Iliad and The Odysee.

Sure, the war looked like it lasted about a week and there was some other weirdness (it seems like it would have been easy to just restrain Paris and send Helen back early on, not that it would have really solved anything), but I thought it was a really fun movie.

I thought it was wonderfully cast, myself - aside from being hot as the sun, Brad Pitt did a great job sulking in his tent and pouting over Patroclus, and Eric Bana, the hottest of them all, was a great Hector. The Hector/Achilles fight was, remarkably, a lot like how I’d pictured it before (minus some of the fighting techniques), and I’m surprised they allowed Achilles to be as much of a jerk as he is in the poems, ditto Paris. And I really liked the shout-out to Aeneas

Along with the compressed time frame (at the very least I was expecting a black screen that said “Ten Years Later”), I thought Achilles’ romance with… what’s her face, was really tacked on, but I could mostly ignore it.

A couple questions -

Did Hector’s wife and child really survive? I thought I remembered them getting killed (in the poems, that is).

Is that how Menalaus died? I can’t remember.

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Bum. My question was actually “is that how Agamemmnon died.”

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No, it’s not how Agamemnon died (or Menelaus, if he actually dies at Troy), and I can say this without even having seen the movie.

Agamemnon’s supposed to get back to Greece and get killed by his wife Clytemnestra, who is pissed that, among other things, he’s ditched her for a slave girl, sacrificed her daughter Iphigenia to the gods, and run off to Troy for ten years. It’s a much more fitting fate all around, if you ask me.

I’ve heard a lot of people say Orlando Bloom is a whiny coward like it’s a bad thing. Isn’t Paris *supposed * to be something of a wuss?

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In the Iliad, Menelaus doesn’t die, and in the Odyssey, we see him living happily at home with Helen, apparently having made their peace with each other.

Theoretically, Andromache lives on as a slave to some Greek warrior (I forget who) but Astyanax is thrown from the walls by the Greeks so that he can’t try to rebuild Troy when he grows up. But that’s from Euripides, not Homer.

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Sorry ‘bout that. Triremes had three banks of oars, one above the other. A few years back, somebody built a modern replica of a big trireme (I recall that it was a Greek government-funded project, but might be wrong). Quite a sight; three rows of oars sticking out of the side of the ship, representing three rowing decks, all the oars moving together. 170 oars total, as I recall. But they came after the time of the Illiad, and they were built for naval engagements. I can’t remember whether there’s any naval action in Homer’s poem – come to think of it, I don’t remember anything about Troy even having a fleet of any significance. As for the ships in the movie – since Agamemnon says something about Achilles wanting to take the beach of Troy with fifty men, I guess Achilles’ ship is a pentèkonteros.

Jurph – looking over your post again, I see that you must have been laying a little satire on us, and I was being thickheaded. Especially with your reference to “that one tendon on his foot”. Pretty funny, in fact.

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I’m no expert on ancient naval architecture, but I know enough to tell you that triremes were three-masted ships. All the ships we saw in the movie were single-masted.

I’m okay with eliminating the role of the gods; Petersen was making a quasi-historical epic, not a Harryhausen FX wet dream. Even Achilles’s invincibility is not asserted as absolute fact.

(About which, I’m working under the assumption that his invulnerability was a field effect of some sort. Such that, once his heel was pierced, the waveform collapsed and one could then wound him in other parts of his body, as we saw Paris do.)

Did Odysseus use the word “sharp” anytime during the movie?

Also, was Odysseus the only mayor of an upstate New York city who fought with the Greeks?

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Or three banks of oars.

:smack:

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I had a Classics-major friend who was incredulous about this, but it just wouldn’t have worked onscreen. It would have complicated things immensely, swelled the cast and storylines, and generally confused the heck out of everything. A few things (like Achilles’ tendon) didn’t make a lot of sense without the supernatural explanations, but I thought it was a good move. It was almost guaranteed to look silly. If you think people laughed at certain things in this movie, the reaction to Athena sweeping Paris away would’ve been way worse.

(Paraphrase) Well, when he tells Achilles “It’s an honor to fight alongside you,” Achilles says “Thank you, Ajax.” That count? :wink:

Because they’re not making The Odyssey, so it doesn’t matter if the movie mucks with other stories. In this movie (with the other changes made), they deserved what they got. The story was made to fit a more conventional Hollywood formula in this and other ways.

Maybe so, but they’re not making that movie either.

Well, he IS supposed to be a jerk.

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Was I the only one who thought he heard a Hulk joke? I swear that Hector said something along the lines of “he’s not a hulking brute.” Or something.

I was hoping someone could fill me in on some of the in-jokes (or things I should have picked up on). I caught the “I hereby give you this here magic sword-motif thing Anaeus,” but there were some other things that I felt I should have picked up on, like, they kept cutting back to Eurhymics looking at Achilles, or someone would turn and look at another character and I felt that in the book that other character gave an important speech.

I’m just glad that we didn’t see stupid shit like one of the heroes scratching “Ajax was here” in a rock on the beach.

The only thing that really bothered me was the awful day-for-night shots. That and for all the talk of Hector being the second-best hero ever, he gave a pretty poor account of himself in the final battle (then again, I haven’t read the Iliad so maybe I don’t know what I’m missing.

With the exception of the final rousing speech (as the Greeks sack Troy), the inspirational speeches sucked ass. I did a quick search on the internet for some notes to the Iliad so I could get any of the references (if they were in there) and found this:

“Always be the best my boy, the bravest,
and hold your head up high above all the others.
Never disgrace the generation of your fathers.”
From Fagles 6, 247-249

That one was pretty cool, methinks.

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Did you hear about the motorboat that saved all the portraits from the art gallery during the last big flood?

It was the launch that shipped a thousand faces…

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:slight_smile: I was at the theatre here in Ithaca, NY last night, and when Ody introduced himself as “the king of Ithaca” the whole place cracked up.
As a classicist, I will refrain from commenting on the decisions made in the movie grumble grumble except to say that the Aeneas “shout-out” was hilarious and that Achilles’ “relationship” with Briseis was incredibly, horrifyingly wrong. She was a WAR PRIZE, not a love interest. Oy gevalt.

Cheers,
Daphne Black