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eye_of_a_catUnless you're a character in the Iliad, of course.
I saw Troy tonight (I'm guessing I don't need spoiler warnings for one of the oldest epics still in circulation). My housemate had seen it already, and recommended it "if you ignore some of the dialogue", so we went to see it together; secretly-deep-down, we're still Classicists. (Our undergraduate Classics professor liked it, too.) It's worth seeing, especially on a big screen, and it was better than I'd expected. But some things...
They took the gods out. They took the gods out. I already knew about this, and I don't really blame them; I'd love to have seen Greek gods done well in a serious modern film, but part of the reason I'd love to see that is because I can't imagine how they'd do it, so quite possibly they couldn't either. (Plus, it would have been terribly confusing and six hours long if they'd tried to fit the gods in.)
But I wasn't expecting them to take the gods out quite so much. They went for a very human-centred Iliad, where people believe in the gods but the gods aren't there. Which, well, okay, Historical Epic. They worked around the plot points that require divinecheating involvement in the story quite well. Except... it made it sort of flat, I think. And it definitely lessened the idea of having characters who think quite differently to us. (Except that one of my favourite parts was the negotiation of burial rituals for Hector, when the script went all subtle and didn't hammer us over the head with Burial Rituals Are Important, just had the characters take this for granted so well that we got the message anyway.) (My other favourite bit was the duel between Menelaus (pronounced 'Men-e-louse', apparently) and Paris, with Paris crawling away and clinging to Hector's ankles.)
They also went for a very hero-centred Iliad, in the sense that they were trying (part of the way, at least) to make it a film about how heroes and myths are created. And this is the sort of thing I like, although here I think there's so much more they could have done with it. When Achilles dies, it's not the arrow in his ankle which kills him, but the four or five in his chest - but he pulls them out, and when his body is found, there's only an arrow in his ankle. I think we were supposed to get the implied "...and when this story is retold, they'll all say that it was just an arrow to the ankle that killed the mighty Achilles!". Hmm. Clever, but...
Oh, and Briseis was about the wimpiest Mary Sue I have ever seen. Helen was at least supposed to not do a great deal, and start a war about as passively as it's possible to do so. Briseis was just a terrible, terrible character all round. I wish she'd stayed as a bit-part, and I hope to hell they didn't give her such an extended role because they needed a good female character, because she's really not it.
I saw Troy tonight (I'm guessing I don't need spoiler warnings for one of the oldest epics still in circulation). My housemate had seen it already, and recommended it "if you ignore some of the dialogue", so we went to see it together; secretly-deep-down, we're still Classicists. (Our undergraduate Classics professor liked it, too.) It's worth seeing, especially on a big screen, and it was better than I'd expected. But some things...
They took the gods out. They took the gods out. I already knew about this, and I don't really blame them; I'd love to have seen Greek gods done well in a serious modern film, but part of the reason I'd love to see that is because I can't imagine how they'd do it, so quite possibly they couldn't either. (Plus, it would have been terribly confusing and six hours long if they'd tried to fit the gods in.)
But I wasn't expecting them to take the gods out quite so much. They went for a very human-centred Iliad, where people believe in the gods but the gods aren't there. Which, well, okay, Historical Epic. They worked around the plot points that require divine
They also went for a very hero-centred Iliad, in the sense that they were trying (part of the way, at least) to make it a film about how heroes and myths are created. And this is the sort of thing I like, although here I think there's so much more they could have done with it. When Achilles dies, it's not the arrow in his ankle which kills him, but the four or five in his chest - but he pulls them out, and when his body is found, there's only an arrow in his ankle. I think we were supposed to get the implied "...and when this story is retold, they'll all say that it was just an arrow to the ankle that killed the mighty Achilles!". Hmm. Clever, but...
Oh, and Briseis was about the wimpiest Mary Sue I have ever seen. Helen was at least supposed to not do a great deal, and start a war about as passively as it's possible to do so. Briseis was just a terrible, terrible character all round. I wish she'd stayed as a bit-part, and I hope to hell they didn't give her such an extended role because they needed a good female character, because she's really not it.
