Hey, Brad Pitt is perfectly capable of playing a scary badass. Hasn’t anyone seen Kalifornia, Snatch and/or Fight Club??
God forbid we scare people away with the actual title of the stories. I realize the marketing people don’t want to scare people away by calling the movie the Illiad, but must we dumb everything down for mass consumption?
Oh dear, that’s a problem. Achilles in the Trojan Horse? Oh dear.
Being a classicist is such a double-edged sword. On the one hand, maybe my discipline is gaining in popularity, thus leading to increased enrollments and better employment chances! But on the other had, the movies are always so inaccurate, you’d almost prefer they weren’t what made you popular…
Well, strictly speaking, you’d have a problem pitching a big-budget movie of the Iliad. We’re at an army camp, people and gods have unreasonable tantrums, well-loved people get killed, there are funerals. The End. Arthouse material at best.
OTOH, a movie of the Trojan War… now you’re talking Big Movie, you have kidnappings, adultery, prophecies of doom, people and gods having tantrums. folks getting killed, funerals, a big wooden horse, a dirty trick, a massacre. Yay. And you get to take material not just from the Iliad but also from the Oddyssey, Oresteiad, Aeneid, as well as that which you just pulled out of you-know-where.
You know, I just got done reading Ben Bova’s version of this war when I first saw the preview. (Vengence of Orion)
I can see Brad Pitt in the role of that Achilles.