Reasons - Plot/Theme

The plot and the theme are being grouped together here because the reasons for these should be relatively short compared to the original analyses and I thought I might as well do them in one big post.

     Plot

The first thing I said about plot was that the difference in coverage between the poem and the film was quite a significant difference. That the poem showed a year of a ten year war and the movie showed all of a 17 day war. The way I see it, this condenses down into two parts: Firstly, the length of the war and secondly, the amount of the war that is shown in the text.
  The amount of the war that is shown is quite an interesting thing to look at. In Ancient Greece, the story of the Trojan War was spread far and wide, and in ten years of war there is a lot of legend to cover. The Iliad is only one part of a huge amount of tales and stories told at the time. For example:

The above vase painting shows Achilles and Ajax having a game of petteia. This happened earlier in the war, before the victory where Achilles won Briseis. This shows that the myths of the Trojan War were many. So the story in the Iliad was just a snapshot, just a little bit of this whole mythology of the time. It doesn't need to cover the whole story. However, in today's society, a lot of people have heard of Achilles and the Trojan War but they don't know the whole story. If only part of the war story was told, many people would be confused, not knowing the beginning or ending of the story. So in that regard, the whole war story must be told.
  The length of the war is actually quite easy to look at too. First of all, lets look at why the Iliad talks about a ten year war. First of all, the real Trojan War was probably ten years long. Simple as that. They might as well have been accurate. Also, by making it ten years they can squeeze lots of stories out of it. The film, on the other hand also has two simple reasons for its short length. Firstly, the shorter the war, the more cost effective it is. To cover a ten year war requires a lot more effort, a much longer movie, and much more money! Troy didn't have an endless budget, and to use their money to the best effect, Petersen made the war short. Also, if they had a longer war, they would have to stretch the plot out until it became excruciatingly slow, and the audience would have got up and left. This is not a good thing when one is trying to attract people to the movie.

  The next thing I talked about was the role of Briseis. This could have fallen into character analyses but I thought that it had more plot influence than other aspects of character. This was an example of the difference of the roles in characters, which is an extensive topic, but I just focused on the one character. I talked about how in the poem all she is is a "prize" and she has almost no role except as an object of desire. However, in the film, she is a very prominent character and helps to develop Achilles, she kills Agamemnon and she has her own personality and dialogue.
  This one is quite interesting to examine. I think that Greeks viewed women in a very different way than we do today. In our culture men and women are equals, but in Greece they were very different. Men were the warriors and society elites, and they grew the food and supported the family, but women made the money. The women in a household were taught to weave and the weaving was sold. So women were used as units of economy. Daughters could be sold to other families. And women could be taken as concubines as war-prizes. And this is what happened with Briseis.
  In Greece, Briseis would have been seen as being a great prize, and all the young teenagers aspiring to be great warriors would want to have a war-prize like her someday. Today, the audience would be shocked if she was treated this much like an object, especially because half of the audience would be women. People in today's society cry out for equality in every respect, so the equality of Briseis as a character was important for Petersen to employ. Also, in today's society it is more believable to have woman doing something significant than it was in Ancient Greece. So in summary, the role of Briseis different to make more sense and to not offend the audience.

  If I had more time I would talk about the difference between the roles of more characters, but looking at the size of my section on Briseis, I suspect that this blog would go on forever. However, I may have to watch that this next section doesn't go on forever either! This will be about the lack of gods in Troy. This is one of the most significant and impacting changes between the two texts. Homer's Iliad has many scenes with the gods featuring as characters and even more where the gods are referenced to or talked about. Petersen's Troy only shows us one goddess (Thetis) and does not say that she is a goddess, and the references to the gods are few and spread apart compared to in the poem.
  In New Zealand today, about half of the population is Christian, and about 40% claims to have no religion. In the remaining 10% of the population there are religions such as Buddhism, Hindu, Islam et cetera, (view pie chart below from wikipedia.org) but the point is that there are lots of different religious views in our culture. In Ancient Greece, I think it is probably safe to say that at least 90% of people believed in the gods. The Greek culture was very much based around their religion. So in any piece of literature the gods must star as major parts of the text because that is what Greeks wrote about. If the gods weren't part of the Iliad in the way they are, the Greeks at the time wouldn't have thought it to be very realistic, or at least they wouldn't have enjoyed it as much.

  In today's Western culture, no one believes in the Greek gods. There might be the odd person who breaks the norm but it is probably safe to say that no one in today's culture believes that the Greek traditional religion is true. In this respect, including the gods as characters or as unstoppable forces seems unrealistic to the audiences of today. The supernatural is hinted at, such as Achilles' death being foretold, and also his death coming from the hands of a bow after he beheaded Apollo's statue. Also, Thetis appears. There are some interesting things about the gods though: The Trojans were portrayed as being much more devout to their patron god (Apollo) than the Greeks, and the stronger characters seem to mostly not believe in the gods. Neither Hector or Achilles is pious at all, and these are the strongest two warriors in the war. Was Petersen trying to tell the audience something about belief in the supernatural? Was he trying to say that religion makes us weak? That's for you to decide (I think he was trying to say this, not that I agree with it).
   In summary, the Iliad has many references to the gods because the gods were real to the audience at that time, and they would be involved in anything big like a war so they had to be in the story, whereas in today's culture no one believes in them, so to include the gods in Troy would ultimately just make it less believable and enjoyable for the audience.

     Theme

The first theme I talked about was Fate. I mentioned its potency and inescapability, but I also mentioned that is does not feature much in the film. One thing I said in the opening of the paragraph was that fate was closely intertwined with the gods, and I've already said in this post the reasons for not having any gods: It's not believable to Western culture. In Ancient Greece, fate was a very prominent part of the Greeks lives.If someone died it was because the gods had ordained for them to have died at that time in that way. If there was a famine, it was because the gods had fated it to be so. This is evident throughout almost all of Greek literature. One great example (outside of the Iliad) is Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles. In this story, the main character, King Oedipus, tells his story about how he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother so he ran away from home to never see them again in case he ever did those horrible things, but later it turns out that he was adopted and because he ran away he ended up unknowingly killing his father and taking his father's wife (his mother) as his own. This exemplifies how large the theme of fate is in Greek literature, and shows why this theme was prominent in the Iliad.
  However, today's culture says that you can be whatever you want or do whatever you want and that you don't have to listen to anyone who tells you what you should do with your life. So the idea that everyone has their own destiny that they cannot escape is not a nice one, and the people watching Troy don't want to walk out of the movie feeling like they have no control over their own life. So by that logic, the theme of fate is hardly prevalent in the film compared to what it is in the original poem.

  The second theme was War: the Glory of it, and the Brutality of it. The idea of war being glorious is almost solely in the poem, whereas both the film and the poem show the brutality of war beautifully. The glory of war being more prominent in the poem is a tricky one on a certain level, but the inevitable and obvious conclusion is that clearly war was more of a good thing in Ancient times. Today we shudder at the sound of war and any hints that we may be going to war soon frighten us to no end. Back then, war was a great thing, a glorious thing, and men would aspire to be great warriors like Heracles and Achilles.Why war was a great thing is a harder question to answer. Maybe it was because Greece was made of lots of "city-states" or polis, and these city-states would war against each other all the time. It's hard to tell, but that is my suspicion.
  The brutality of war is another aspect of theme that is interesting to look at, because it contrasts quite strongly with the theme of the glory of war. While the glory of war is something that is beautiful and and desirable about war, the brutality is something that should put everyone off war. Why was Homer both glorifying war and thrusting the brutality of it in your face? Is the Iliad glory, or gory? There are a few possibilities that spring to mind. Maybe Homer was trying to dispel the illusion of grandeur that war portrays by first putting up a facade of glory but then tearing it down with bloody battle scenes and disturbing descriptions. Maybe Homer was reveling in the brutality of it, maybe he loved the goriness and the power of one man over another and the two aspects of war in his mind were one and the same. Or maybe I am misinterpreting the brutality of it and he is just telling it as it is because that is how it is. My thoughts are that the second is correct. Even though the way I say it makes Homer sound like a sadistic, twisted person (or persons), but the idea that the Greeks reveled in battle is undeniable, so by including bloody battle sequences he appealed to the crowd.
  Which brings me very nicely to the brutality in Troy. Ajax was an example I used of brutality, but Achilles is another great example. Ajax showed raw power and made us flinch whenever he hit someone, but Achilles was finesse and perfection, an unstoppable dancer. Petersen was very graphic in his fight scenes, showing bits of blood and gore flying up from weapons, and scenes such as Patroclus with his neck cut open or Hector with a spear in his heart were brutal. Was Petersen trying to show us all how brutal war is? Or was he really stealing ratings? I'm sure most people reading this can honestly say they love watching fight sequences in movies. They are so thrilling, and the more brutal and realistic they are, the more we enjoy rooting for our favourites and wincing whenever something really sore happens. Petersen may have been trying to teach us about the brutality and the horrors of war, but in reality I think he was just trying to show us some really cool fights.