Troy movie final duel
Adding to the conversation started by Josh Tatter
This is in response to Josh Tatter’s critique of the 2004 Troy My comment got too long so I thought I’d make an actual post. #Sword and Saturday
So I sat down with my notebook and prepared to watch Troy, since I just finished the Iliad, and found out I couldn't rent it – I'd have to buy it, which I won't do for streaming content. If I'm going to buy something, I need something material in hand. So I watched a clip of the scene where Hector says good-bye to Andromache, which happens very early in the Iliad, but in the movie, looks like it's happening just before the final duel with Achilles. And I watched a clip of the duel.
It reminded me of the Conan the Barbarian movie in 1982. I liked it and thought it was actually true to a lot of the spirit of the Howard stories. It even included some actual scenes and characters from the stories, but it got a lot of things wrong.1
The duel seemed to get some things correct about the characters of both Achilles and Hector, while still being completely wrong in almost every detail except the fact that Hector lost. It's as if the screenwriters put together things that did happen at other points of the Iliad and put it there. From your article, it also looks like they put Hector's realization that he has no hope, which in the Iliad doesn't happen until this final duel, much earlier in the movie? That would completely incorrect. Andromache intuits, very early in the Iliad, that they are doomed, but Hector, while accepting it as a possibility, maintains hope, even at the start of the final duel.
The problem is, I'm not sure how you'd make a movie showing the final duel as it actually was, without making Achilles look way overpowered. Basically, in the Iliad, Achilles fights Hector 2 to 1. He has Athena as his second, who returns his spear to him after he throws it at Hector and misses. Hector, himself, doesn't miss when he throws his spear at Achilles, but it hits his Hephaestus-made shield and bounces off. So Achilles kills him with his spear because Hector can't reach Achilles with his sword fast enough. And it really is that fast. That’s the whole fight.
It read to me like Homer wanted the duel to show that Achilles did NOT win by being the better fighter. The build-up of Achilles' fighting prowess all happens in references of things that happened before the events of the Iliad. In the Iliad itself, he always acts with the "super armor" he got from the gods, or else gets help from gods when he would otherwise be in danger of losing.
So I don't know. It's not very dramatic to have the point of the final duel to be that Hector is simply not going to be allowed to win.
I actually wrote out an outline of what I would have included in the movie, using the Cypria, the Iliad, and the Aeneid. Maybe I’ll try to do some short stories.
For example, the character of Valeria gives a speech that is directly from Belit in the “Queen of the Black Coast.”
While Troy, the movie, was not accurate to Homer.
I must say, I did enjoy the film, for what it is, and it was a beautiful film.
A thing completely absent in the film is the Supernatural. The Gods, do not appear, and, Achilles actually mocks Apollo early on, beheading a statue of Apollo during a raid on a temple of Apollo.
Absent Athena,
I think the duel between Hector and Achilles was well done.
While not accurate to the Illiad, it was a pretty decent fight.