Troy

[liadnan]

To the Odeon Leicester Square with Jen, Gideon and Olympia, for Troy.

Amusing, but ultimately a Bad Film I fear. I was more irritated by the massacre of the plot, whether it be the legend in general or the Iliad in particular, and by the wooden acting than by the liberties taken with the archaeology, and think I may have blown Olympia's fuse by suggesting that at least they'd made an effort. OK, I know Arthur Evans stylee Minoan columns, the Assyrian gates from the British Museum, and various other Assyrian bits and pieces have nothing whatsoever to do with Mycenaean era Troy, but hey, they could have filled the sets with classical columns and got away with it so far as most of the audience were concerned.

The literary angle bothers me more. I've always argued that one should never expect the film to resemble the book: in fact, when it does it's usually a mistake (see the Harry Potter films for a particular example). A few hours of film cannot possibly fit in the whole of the Iliad (let alone the whole of the Trojan War), with all of its subtleties, just as it could not possibly, even in more than nine hours, fit in every detail of The Lord of the Rings. If you want faithfulness to the words, and what you see to correspond to the mental image you have, I suggest you stick to the book... Compromises have to be made, characters cut and/or merged, bits of plot condensed and simplified. It simply is not possible to convey everything, still less to convey everything and hold the audience's attention.

What's irritating is when, as in Troy, they make the wrong compromises. It's entirely fair to find a female character to beef up, but why choose Chryseis/Briseis, when you have Andromache, Helen and (not appearing in this film) Hecuba and Cassandra to choose from (or find some way to bring in Clytemnestra)? That just screws up their real place in the story. No, you can't actually film ten years of fighting, but you can have a "ten years later" caption (particularly if you're going to have a "12 days later" caption. Homer himself does something rather similar, and that way you wouldn't have to kill two major characters on the second day of the war, and far too early in terms of the dramatic narrative of the film (killing your comic relief in the first third of the film is usually considered bad form). Demoting Achilles and promoting Agamemnon actually detracts from the point you're trying to make, You can have Achilles die when he should: it adds to the pathos rather than detracting from it. You could kill a few more of the people who are supposed to die, it isn't as though you're really having a happy ending anyway.

Above all, this is 2004. You can, actually, have one of the three key relationships of the story have its proper sexual ambiguity. The heavens will not fall and the audiences will still come.

Nevertheless, in and of itself, fun. The film is uneven, and the plot develops far too quickly, with far too little time given to developing the relationships between the main characters (they could have lost a fair amount of the pre-invasion part without doing any harm). Brad Pitt has done better work. But the fight scenes are fun, Hector gets to quote Stalin, and there's a lovely pan-shot of, yes, precisely 1000 50-oared galleys (although Jen swears one of them was a viking longboat).