I'm certainly not much of a classicist, but it didn't take long for me to realize that "Troy" is an affront to Homer's "Iliad.". And if I was annoyed, I have to imagine that real scholars of Classical Greece were cringing.
They might as well have called the movie "Brad Pitt sweating in rage and lust," dispensed with the dialogue and cut the flick down to the 100 minutes it (barely) deserved.
It's not as if "The Iliad" is short on sex, violence, and intrigue, after all. And Homer provides plenty of imagery to make the story adaptible for the silver screen.
So I don't understand why it was necessary to distort the story so badly, even if Achilles were to be the centerpiece. If yoy're going to spend that much money on a movie, why bastardize the epic poem that "inspired" it?
The characters in "The Iliad" are deeply flawed, yet larger than life leaders who attract the attention (and even intervention) of the gods. They are raging ids, each obsessed in ways that should resonate in our own time. The setting is a bloody, protracted war that preumably laid waste not just Troy but most of Greece. It's been interpreted as a clas of civilzations, possibly a turning point in European history. But the movie makes it seem like a three-week expedition consisting mainly of duels and something similar to the line of scrimmage in football.
Perhaps "The Iliad" should be a mini-series or a trilogy instead, illustrating not just Brad Pitt's body but the depth of Homer's literature to give us a sense of continuity between the Trojan War and our own wars.
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