Troy: 5 Reasons Why It's Worth A Re-Visit
4. Tackling The Trojan War Onscreen Is Hugely Ambitious
Similarly, ambition isn't necessarily a reason for why you should like a film, but in this case I think it's something that should especially be acknowledged and admired, and I'm generally all for lauding ambitious films (The Fountain and the recent Cloud Atlas for example). The origin and conclusion of the Trojan War are pretty well known I'd hazard. It's caused by Helen's elopement from Sparta to Troy with Paris, whereupon the Greeks all club together to bring her back and sack the city. After ten years this is finally achieved through Odysseus' trick of the Wooden Horse. These are the bare-bone facts of the story that need to make it into any Hollywood film, not only because most such films tend to respond to a need for totality and completion but also because it cannot be assumed that the modern cinema audience will be familiar with these details. The Iliad, as I've already mentioned, isn't about the Trojan War per se, rather one important fifty-day episode in the ninth year, but familiarity with the poem's background was already ensured for the ancient audience since its characters were the heroes and gods of the living mythological traditions that permeated all aspects of the ancient world. The same cannot be said for modern western society. We have our own history, stories, and legends that form the bedrock of our culture. And Troy was not made for Classicists and academics; a film of its budget needed a strong commercial performance and thus it had to be designed to appeal to as broad a demographic as possible. Though I don't want to get into discussion of modern average audience sophistication, this meant primarily that the film had to include a great deal of exposition and include the war's beginning and ending. Concerning those who did know the basic story, seeing elements such as the Wooden Horse fully realised onscreen was patently a desire that needed fulfilment also. By way of modern comparison to the Iliad's reception in ancient times, Second World War films tend to cover individual battles or campaigns and the overall backdrop is far more commonly known so as to not require detailed explanation. Such films I would suggest might easily be seen as microcosms of the entire conflict; the Allied victory in a certain battle or war theatre serving to echo on a reduced scale the final global outcome. Of course, no film of realistic length could hope to narrate the war in its entirety, but similarly no single film concerned with the Trojan War, even one that incorporated both its origin and outcome, could hope to incorporate every single story and tradition from the inherited conglomerate of mythology. Outside the realm of modern history, British culture possesses its own popular tales and legends that are constantly retold and reinterpreted, King Arthur and Robin Hood for instance, as evidenced by the number of films and television shows over the past century, many of which focus on individual parts, rather than the whole, of their overall legend. Undoubtedly however, the one story that has perpetuated all of western culture is that of the New Testament, the life of Christ, of which knowledge is so universal that this alone could be said to justify Mel Gibsons artistic choice to have The Passion of the Christ cover only the final twelve hours of Jesus life, with little introduction or reference to the preceding events of his story. And that was a film that grossed $612 million worldwide. Anyway, once you've accepted that any Hollywood treatment of the Trojan War is likely to include both its origin and outcome, and when you consider Troy in the context of its cinematic predecessors, it becomes readily apparent just how ambitious it was. Helen of Troy from 1956 covered the war from start to finish. There's a heavy focus on the romance of Paris and Helen who are film's main protagonists, whilst Achilles, the war's most famous hero, is sidelined as a secondary villain who threatens their love. The tumultuous events of the Iliad, which deal with Achilles' wrath towards Agamemnon, his subsequent withdrawal from the army, and the resulting devastative consequences for the Greeks, are accordingly marginalised and covered within roughly a minute so as to not distract too much from the 1950's-inspired romantic fiddle-faddle. The film unequivocally presents the Trojans as the good guys and the Greeks as the bad guys, adopting an all too familiar Hollywood cliché in epic films.
Fifty years later Troy doesn't marginalise the love theme or the grander scheme of the entire war; there's plenty of time devoted to Paris and Helen's relationship and the war's origin, but crucially the film swings the pendulum back somewhat to the essence of the Iliad by having Achilles as the principal character and focusing heavily on the theme of his wrath towards Agamemnon and the effects this has on the Greek army. Whatever one personally thought of it, Achilles' meditation on the human condition as prompted by his indignation at the high king was a far more ambitious artistic decision than anything we'd seen in the film's Hollywood predecessor. It could well be argued that the finished product is clunky, that the focus on both the love plot and the wrath plot against the backdrop of the whole conflict is not especially well balanced, but it was a bold move nonetheless. Petersens film is also considerably more even-handed in the treatment of the two sides, with far less of the black-and-white-ness that had characterised the 50's version. Greeks and Trojans alike are shown to be both valiant and flawed, in a more realistic and empathetic depiction of war.
I still reckon the most ambitious move would be if Hollywood did do a film of the Trojan War focused solely on the events of the Iliad. It's a long shot, but hey a guy can dream...