Troy Movie Review

Katie Callahan

Mr.Neumann

World Literature

February 6, 2012

Troy Movie Review

            There are few movies that can satisfy both man and woman in today’s Hollywood productions. In fact I can only think of less than ten movies that would fill that category. One of the movies however is Troy. Troy takes place about 1250 B.C. in Greece. Troy has a lot of action to satisfy the guys and a little bit of romance to satisfy the girls. Unfortunately for us girls, Troy is more an action movie. The film stars Brad Pitt as Achilles and other prominent stars such as Brian Cox as Agamemnon, Orlando Bloom as Paris, and Diane Kruger as Helen. The plot is based on Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad. Both plots take place during the Trojan War, except Troy goes into more detail about what caused the war.

            Troy starts off with Agamemnon and the Greek army preparing to take over another Greek city-state. The leaders agree that instead of a huge battle, they will just have their best fighters fight each other. Whoever wins will either refrain from taking over the city-state, in Agamemnon’s case, or handover the city-state.  So Achilles fights the other guys fighter, and Agamemnon takes over the city-state. A little later, We see a celebration in Sparta. The celebration is over the peace treaty of Troy and Sparta. This scene is relevant because this is why the Trojan War was fought, at this celebration Paris and Helen fell in love. At the first battle, Achilles chooses to spare Hector for now, which is in the Greeks minds is completely crazy. A girl, Briseis, is taken that same day and she is given to Achilles. Now Agamemnon is a huge jerk and takes Briseis from Achilles and Achilles than chooses that he wont fight anymore.  As we watch the movie, we learn that Achilles cousin is becoming more and more anxious to fight. So young Petroclus, steals his cousins armour and goes into battle only to be slain by Hector. This pisses off Achilles and he finally gets back into battle. The first thing on his to-do list is to kill Hector. He rides his chariot to the entrance of Troy where the one on one battle occurs and Hector falls.

Though there are a lot of differences between the Iliad and the movie, the setting and the set design stayed the same. The epic poem and Troy take place in Greece about 1250 B.C. So at least when they created the setting for the movie they stayed true to the location set in the Illiad.

With all stories that were written almost a millennium ago, there are going to be a lot of differences if one of those stories happens to be adapted into a movie. The plot is usually one of the first things to change. An example would be, the war prizes. In the Iliad, there were two important war prizes. Achilles was given Briseis and the other girl, Chryseis, was given to Agamemnon. In the movie Troy, Briseis was the only war prize and she just so happened to be Hector and Paris’s cousin. Also in the movie, the Gods are not seen. They are talked about but never seen.

Overall, I liked the Movie..... and no it wasn’t because of Brad Pitt. It was a really good film and the characters were cast well. I did overall like Troy better than the Iliad because it was so much easier to understand and did not bore you to sleep. For instance the battle. In the book you read about it and its ok and really boring. Than in the movie, you see the battles and you get sucked in. If you like Action movies or Brad Pitt movies I would recommend the movie, but if you are more into reading and loathe Brad Pitt..... yeah just read the book.