Quote:
Originally Posted by VONHARRIS
Troy stinks!
It has nothing to do with Greek mythology , and trust me I know MY mythology.
Sorry , I couldn't help it.
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I've been reading and studying Greek mythology for 40 years. Does
Troy stick to the story of the Trojan War and its myriad characters as told in the most wellknown (to us) versions of the story (i.e. the Iliad and Odyssey)?
Nope. But:
Did the Iliad and Odyssey stick to the story of the Trojan War and its myriad characters as told in every previous version of those events that ever existed?
The odds are against it. They probably weren't even written down in the form we have now until generations after the death of the man who supposedly composed them, and we don't even know if he really existed or is more myth than man himself.
In short, the only reason we think of the Homeric version of those events as being the "right" version is because at some point one version of
that version got written down and the tale became static instead of fluid and the shaping and reshaping of those stories stopped. To dislike
Troy simply because somebody decided to reshape the story of those events again after two and a half millennia (give or take a century) is, to me, just silly.
And what else were they supposed to do? The Trojan War lasted for
years. How do you convey that in a ~3 hour feature film? Or do you start, like the Iliad does, with the wrath of Achilles and his withdrawal from the fight, and then fill in all the necessary backstory through clunky voiceovers or extended flashbacks? Because I'm telling you, the average movie-goer is gonna need that backstory to understand what's going on.
And what about Agamemnon, the villain of the piece? Do you want to have to show him sailing all the way back to the Argolid to get what's coming to him? Rather anticlimactic, after the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy and all of that business. And wait, what's coming to him has nothing to do with the bit of the story that we actually just saw here in Troy, it has to do with what happened at Aulis ten+ years ago before he ever got to Troy. There's those pesky flashbacks again...
Troy isn't about "Greek mythology." I don't think it's even *supposed* to be about Greek mythology. If it were, I think we'd see a lot more of the Olympians hanging about and interfering in things, which actually makes up quite a bit of the classical and pre-classical versions of the tale. Except for Achilles' mother, there's none of that, and I don't even know that they specifically indicated whether she was really some type of immortal being or just a mortal with a gift for divination of the future.
What it is IMO is simply another retelling of a story that has fascinated a good part of the human race for over 2000 years, and an attempt to tell it in a way that will provide maximum dramatic impact given the time constraints of a feature film production. And they did a much better job of it than I expected, I must say.
Edit: What REALLY gets under my skin is that no one has ever made a good, reasonably (given what we know and what has been passed down) accurate movie about Thermopylae. I'm willing to grant some license but, seriously. I enjoyed
300 but it went way too far "out there" in many respects, IMO at least. And of course now it's unlikely that anyone will ever tackle that subject matter again in my lifetime.
And don't talk to me about
The 300 Spartans. I tried to watch that once. UGH.
