Having
not read the “Illiad” (or having read it a long time ago and having
forgotten), I am unsure as to whether the movie, "Troy," most closely resembled that version
or Shakespeare’s, however, I can tell you where it strayed from the text.
The
movie, “Troy,” starring Bradd Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Diane Kruger (as Helen),
was almost a reenactment of “Troillus and Cressida” by Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s play, the characters
Troillus and Cressida are completely excluded from the movie. This elision is most disappointing, because
instead of watching a movie about the sadness of war, we watch a movie that
glorifies it mostly since we hardly get any pangs of sadness from the ending of
the movie—or at least I did not, anyway.
We do see the death of Aeneas and Achilles crying towards the end. Another difference from the text is that Hector
is completely defeated in a fair battle with Achilles, whereas, in “Troillus
and Cressida,” Hector is literally stabbed to death while he is in a weak
position. However, after reading online sources about the "Illiad," the director has kept most closely to the original text, whereas Shakespeare was the one who strayed.
The
omission of Cressida and Troillus just shows how much the director did not want
to read further texts about the topic or explore hard-to-dramatize topics such
as war and death. (But let's assuming the
director read most pertinent texts with regards to the Trojan war; his choice was clouded by the politics of the day, which would have been
when George W. Bush was in power).
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