Troy

Picture a 50 ft. wall next to a 40 ft. wooden horse. When you picture this lovely sight, you know what the city of Troy looked like hours before it’s destruction. The Iliad is a rather long book it has twenty four parts, and obviously they couldn’t make twenty four movies, so they combined all of them into one. They couldn’t put every little detail in the movie either. That would be too long and boring. My essay will be comparing the movie Troy to The Iliad, some key points are; One, Helen in the Iliad did not love Paris. Two, Achilles didn’t fall in love with Hector and Paris’ cousin Briseis. And the most important, the war. Now we can begin with Helen and Paris.

Helen did not love Paris. In fact, she didn’t even know who he was until he abducted her. In the movie, Paris and his older brother Hector had been making peace with Sparta, during which Paris had been seducing the kings wife. Obviously that was not like the true story. According to The Iliad the story is that three of the goddesses on Mount Olympus, Aphrodite, Hera, and Artemis, wanted what is called THE GOLDEN APPLE, the one who was most beautiful would get it. They first asked Zeus to choose the winner, but he couldn’t decide between his wife/sister, and his two favorite daughters. So he chose a mortal, Paris, to decide. Each of the goddesses offered Paris something to get him to choose her. He chose Aphrodite, she promised him the most beautiful women in all of Greece, which was Helen. He than went to Sparta and clamed his prize. This supposedly caused the war, but it really only gave King Agamemnon the excuse to seize Troy. Agamemnon was very greedy and wanted to rule all of the Greeks. Which brings us to the subject of Briseis.

Briseis was the cousin of Hector, and Paris. Which is true in The Iliad and Troy. In both, Briseis was abducted by Achilles and his men at the beginning of the Trojan war. Even the King wanted her for his own use. But Achilles did not allow it, he had abducted her for “booty” and that was used in both senses apparently. Briseis had chosen a specific life before her abduction, she had chosen never to be married and become a priestess for the God Apollo. To be a priestess you had to be a virgin, and obviously after she was abducted she couldn’t become one anymore. Also, in the movie, Achilles and Briseis ended up falling in love, it didn’t end up that way in The Iliad. I liked that in the movie though, I found myself wanting Achilles to survive just so he could run away with Briseis and they could live happily ever after! Which brings up the last key point; The War.

In The Iliad, The Trojan War lasted for 9 years. Because Sparta and Troy were so far apart most of the story takes place on boats and other Islands in Greece. In the movie everything went by very fast, even the fights. While reading The Iliad it was hard to understand the difficulty in the fights, seeing the movie really showed the skill of Achilles and how he felt fighting for a king he hated. In the book, you knew that Achilles was hard-core, but you didn’t get the full picture. I liked that about the movie. I also liked watching the special features on the DVD and how they choreographed the fight between Hector and Achilles. They developed a new fighting style just for Achilles. The style has fewer extra moves and lots of jumps. He always tries to stab the opponent in the back of the neck. Brad Pit said “Every shot was a kill shot”.

In conclusion, Helen didn’t love Paris. She didn’t even know him or why he was abducting her. Briseis and Achilles were not in love, she wanted to become a priestess, and because of Achilles and Agamemnon she didn’t get to. And in the movie Troy, the war only lasted only 2-3 months, and the shorter they made the movie the more they had to cut out of the war. I really liked seeing this movie, who wouldn’t want to see Brad Pitt in a skirt?? I would recommend seeing it edited just because there are some bad parts, and it is rated R. GO BRAD PITT!!