Homer's Illiad is one of the great works of literature of all time. Together with its sequel, the Odyssey, it was the work on which Alexander the Great based his entire life. He read a section from one or the other every day, and kept the volumes next to his bed. It's a grand and stirring epic, depicting the final year of a ten-year war, a war so great that the gods themselves fought in it and pitted their strengths against one another. It has both huge battle and intense man-to-man fights. It has great loves and great deaths. Sounds like it'd make a great movie, huh?

So they made Troy.

When Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, steals Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta, Menelaus' brother Agamemnon brings together kings, warlords, and warriors from all over Greece. A thousand sleek galleys set forth to bring Helen home. Foremost among the attacking warriors is Achilles, the finest fighter known. When Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel over the captive girl Briseis, Achilles vows to not take part in the battle. This leaves the Greeks terribly vulnerable to the Trojan army, led by Hector, who is second only to Achilles in battle. When Hector mistakenly kills Patroclus, who is wearing Achilles' armor, Achilles rejoins the battle to take revenge for the death of his kinsman. No man, not even Hector, can stand against Achilles, and without their Prince, Troy is doomed.

So much for a plot summary which manages to cover how the movie follows the myth. Beyond this, it actually becomes easier to list the ways in which the movie was true to the story than its errors.

What Troy Got Right:

Priam comes through the camp of the Greeks to get back the maltreated body of his son Hector after Achilles shamefully drags it behind his chariot. Achilles gives back the body and promises a truce for several days while the funeral games take place.

Achilles is killed by the right person, who sneaks up on him and shoots him.

The famous wooden Horse was left on the shore while the Greeks sailed away, and was taken into the city because it was believed to be a sacrifice to a god.

Actually, these latter two events are not in the Illiad, which ends with Hector's funeral. Those stories are found in other works, like Virgil's Aeneid and some of the plays of Euripides.

Having exhausted the topic of what the movie got right, we can now move on to some of the more stunning examples of what it got wrong.

At the beginning of the movie, we are told that Agamemnon has been at war for decades, trying to take over all of Greece, and that Menelaus wishes to make peace with Troy. This is nonsense for a number of reasons. First, Agamemnon was kept pretty busy running Mycenae (of which he was King). Second, it was not possible at that time to unite Greece, or even for any king to subjugate any significant portion of his neighbors, as communication was nigh-impossible. Third, while Greeks (or, rather, Achaians, since 'Greek' is a term of mild opprobrium from the Roman era) had gone to war against Troy in the previous generation, when Heracles (Hercules) was refused payment for services by Priam's father, the Greek city-states and Troy had been at peace ever since. Certainly there was a very significant political dimension to Agamemnon and Menelaus' decision to go to war to retrieve Helen, but not because Agamemnon was power-hungry. Rather, this was in the nature of enforcing alliances among the Greeks, all of whom had pledged to protect Helen's husband's rights to her before her father had chosen her husband for her. But this rewrite informs the character, turning an honorable, if over proud and a bit greedy, man into a power-mad would-be emperor who is apparently the villain of a piece that doesn't need one. A lesson the today's world could take from the Illiad is that a war only needs enemies, not villains.

When Odysseus finds Achilles to call him to the muster, Achilles is training his young cousin Patroclus. Of all the changes, except for leaving out the gods as participants, this one was probably the most expected. Unfortunately, it also robs a lot of what follows of meaning and sense. Yes, Achilles and Patroclus were cousins (Patroclus' father and Achilles' grandfather were half-brothers), but Patroclus was the elder, by a generation. Further, this rather tenuous kinship alone hardly seems enough to throw Achilles into a murderous rage which leads him to take blasphemous actions. His feelings about the matter make more sense if you know that, first, at the beginning of the ten-year-long Trojan War, Achilles was a boy of perhaps 14 or 15 (making him roughly 24 when Patroclus dies), and, further, that Patroclus and Achilles are presumed to have been lovers, as was common between young men and their mentors. Also, since I've brought up Achilles' age, when Odysseus found him, he was hiding among the maidens at the court of Lycomedes of Scyros, disguised as one of them. This seems to have been his mother's idea, as the goddess Thetis was always very protective of her child. At any rate, Achilles was glad to go to war, and left with Odysseus.

The muster is accomplished in a rather shorter time than the two years discussed in mythology, and similarly the decade-long war seems to take about a month. The story of the Illiad does not begin until the war is in its final year, so the movie pretty much skips everything that happens between the abduction of Helen and the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles, and then adds a random sack of a Temple of Apollo by Achilles. This seems to have been added to set up an early confrontation between Achilles and Hector, who we know are destined to be deadly enemies; and to give a way to introduce the character of Briseis, in whom the screenwriters managed to combine four separate mythological figures: Chryseis, Briseis, Polyxena, and Clytemnestra. It upset me enormously that they would write such a scene because, aside from one or two mistakes made in anger, Achilles honored the gods, always. After all, he was half-god himself. Further, the one figure in the Trojan War who does defile a temple was shunned by the other Achaians and destroyed by the gods.

From here we embark on a series of conflated characters, early deaths, late deaths, characters killed by the wrong people, and rearranged motives and occurrences. Menelaus, who should survive to take Helen home, is killed early on. Ajax the Greater is given a much more honorable, and much earlier, death than was his in antiquity. Agamemnon's impiety in refusing to return the daughter of an Apollonian priest is gone, since that girl has been combined with Briseis, and so the plague which Apollo brings upon the Achaians disappears, only to turn back up as an anomalous part of Odysseus' ruse to get the Horse taken into the city (the plot in mythology makes so much more sense than that in the movie because it requires an Act of God). Patroclus steals Achilles' armor rather than being loaned it. Achilles actually lives rather longer than he is supposed to, and Paris survives much too long, while Agamemnon doesn't make it home to be murdered on his doorstep by his wife. I could go on, but I have probably already said more than enough.

Anachronism and flat-out fantasies abound as well. Armor and helmets are too advanced, swords are leaf-shaped and can have bizarre and pointless significances. Recurve bows and fire-arrows don't belong, and nor do the bizarre weapons we dubbed "giant flaming balls of twine". The Greeks are all camping in yurts. Someone told me they spotted a llama in one scene!

Logical fallacies exist in profusion. Why didn't the Trojans flank the Myrmidons' tortoise formation? Why was the Apollonian temple outside the walls of the city? Why did the Trojans walk among plague-ridden bodies to retrieve the Horse, and why did they take it into the city?

Okay, I hear you say, we know you know way too much about ancient Greece to be happy with it. But was it a good movie?

Er, no, not really. I mean, yes, it was occasionally exciting and mostly pretty, but if I just wanted that, I'd watch Van Helsing again, which was at least not bad enough to make me cry.

The writing was dreadful. Speeches which ought to have been stirring mostly managed to bore me. The love scenes between Paris and Helen were almost as bad as those between Anakin and Padme in Attack Of The Clones. The only dialogue which I found affecting was that which closely followed one or another of the translations of the Illiad. The script also demonizes Agamemnon, softens Achilles, and turns any sympathetic character from a pious man to a modern secular humanist. I am forced to wonder why they let an apparent newcomer to screenwriting (David Benioff) work with this material.

Casting and acting varied enormously, from the abysmal to the perfect. When I first heard that Troy was being made and that Brad Pitt was playing Achilles, I was actually pleased with that choice. Achilles is young, emotionally unstable, and a downright asshole, but he has honor and a way of making you like him at odd moments. He's also the son of a goddess, and ought to carry a glow about him. Pitt's performance in Fight Club demonstrated that he could play, and play very well, a likable, psychopathic jerk; and he certainly seems to have a certain light about him. Somehow, though, he managed to wander through the entire film looking more like a surfer-boy than a demideity. Garrett Hedlund (Patroclus) follows his lead there, and looks at all times as if he's about to proclaim, "Dude! Look at those waves!"

Brian Cox seems to be trying to play Agamemnon as Sean Connery or Brian Blessed might, if either of them were badly directed. Orlando Bloom is awfully busy being Orlando Bloom, looking pretty and accomplishing little, but that's perfectly in line with the character of Paris, so I didn't mind too much. Rose Byrne was wonderfully strong as Briseis, right up until her character fell in love with Achilles in an unlikely scene that somehow goes from her holding a knife to his throat to them having sex. Eric Bana is a credible Hector whenever he has a good actor to play against. Sean Bean made the most of his little screen time as Odysseus, and played him so well that I can only hope that they find a good director and screenwriter to put together the Odyssey, just so he can star in it.

And Peter O'Toole was the gem of the film. His Priam was stunning. The only scene that succeeded in bringing me to tears when it should have was Priam kissing Achilles' hands and asking for the body of his first-born son. He and Bean are the only actors I can believe actually read Homer before getting in front of the camera.

Director Wolfgang Petersen elected to have everyone affect a Mid-Atlantic accent. It bothered me the whole movie. I suppose that it was intended to give a sense of dignity and antiquity, but to me it just sounded like amateurs putting on Shakespeare.

The battle scenes were poorly planned and staged, and didn't take enough advantage of the landscape. They looked as though somebody had tried to copy various things they like about the battles from Braveheart, Lord of the Rings, and half-a-dozen cheesy fantasy movies, and did it badly. The tactics were abysmal, too, according to the military historian who watched it with me.

Individual fight scenes tended to be rather better, even good . . . with the exception of the one fight which ought to have been the best: Hector and Achilles. The fighting, which hadn't actually been too bad (except that people kept stabbing each other with bronze swords), but apparently both Achilles and Hector completely forgot how to fight, because even I could see openings in their defenses. The sequence was choppily edited and sometimes too-plainly green-screened. Add to this the clumsy, lightsaber-like sound effects and the Highlander-esque way in which both combatants pulled swords out of thin air. And just before the fight, when Achilles stood before the unconquerable walls of Troy and called out his enemy's name again and again until Hector came out to meet him, all I could think was, "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"

The soundtrack rarely caught my attention, except when they decided that what was needed to heighten the pathos of a moment was some nice, disturbing Generic Middle-Eastern Wailing.

Barring some armor trouble, I was quite pleased with the costuming. The textiles were gorgeous, in fact, beautiful enough to distract me during closeups.

A few, faint nods were given to some of the missing elements, particularly in Achilles' story: He meets with his mother as she wades in the sea, picking up seashells, and she says she knows the future. When we first see him, he's waking up in his tent with a young woman sprawled across him, and a young man asleep next to him. When Achilles is shot repeatedly, he pulls out every arrow but the one through his heel. Somehow, though, I don't feel that these nods to mythology make up for everything they took away.

It was a bad movie by nearly every standard I can think of, except for the purely visual. The only way I might be convinced to watch it again is if a friend of mine actually attempts to play the drinking game he's working on, since within ten minutes I ought to be too drunk to care. Nevertheless, if you know nothing of Greek mythology, or history, or combat, and all you want is a pretty action movie to turn off your mind with, you might enjoy Troy.

[Rebecca Scott]