Depicting the great story of Homer’s Iliad, the 2004 motion picture Troy starring Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom provides a fairly accurate portrayal while at the same time maintaining that Hollywood flare.

The film did a good job showcasing different types of fighting that could have been used during that time. There were scenes of open battle initially on the beaches of Troy, and scenes of a more organized Trojan wall of shields that were used to fight off a large amount of Greek soldiers. The one on one fighting scenes of Achilles, Paris, Patroclus and Prince Hector were also fairly accurate according to the Iliad and Greek legend.

Paris is also accurately depicted as sort of a coward as he prefers to fight from a distance with his bow and arrow (eventually fatally wounding Achilles by shooting him in the heel). The common respect for the dead is also portrayed often as both sides are shown collecting their dead while the fighting stops and is also shown when Hector’s body is abused after he is slain by Achilles. Some aspects of the movie that deviated from the original story of the Iliad included character deaths that did not happen in the correct way/order, Helen claiming she was not of Spartan descent even though in reality she was a Spartan Princess and Menelaus became King of Sparta by marrying her, and most criminal of all, choosing to portray a ten year siege as we know from Homer, in just the span of a couple weeks. There were a number of sieges that took place in neighboring city states and towns of Troy that were not mentioned and there was also a lack of film on the massive Greek fleet’s difficult journey towards Troy.

Despite these flaws, most of what we see in the movie makes sense relative to the time period and to the Iliad. The movie did have to make some of these decisions in order to compact the story of the great Trojan War into a two hour film and that is understandable. Characters were killed off in different fashions in order to create more conflict and drama in the film, and backstories of characters were slightly twisted in order to provide a more touching role that the audience of the film could rally behind. Even though Troy includes some fiction and missing key aspects, it will still go down as a well made movie about the Greek conflict we all know and love.

-Jacob Ramos

Works Cited

-https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/historical-review-troy-good-bad-ugly.html/2

-https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0332452/