Adaptation

What the Greek warriors strived for was kleos, or ‘glory through poetry’. The world the Greekslived in was markedly different from ours, not just in terms of goods and technology. The world of the Greekswas different in terms of ethics and values as well, in part due to their mythology and religion. Hindumythology, for one, has evolved to have ideas of heaven, hell, and reincarnation, and several flavoursthereof, but Greek mythology in the time of Homer had no easy way out for the ordinary person. Most peopleended up in Hades, a nightmarish vision of Hell with howling dogs and screaming monsters. Those who got intothe happier environs of the Elysian Fields were kings, heroes, artists and poets. A happy life after deathcoincided with fame here on earth. The Greeks felt that their only hope was to be remembered by theirsuccessors in poetry and song. So they aimed for kleos. Troy captures this best in the scene whereAchilles (Brad Pitt) lands on the beaches of Troy. Achilles yells to his men: "Immortality! Take it! Itis yours!" Ambition, immortality, kleos.

Wolfgang Petersen, the director of "Troy", wants to shine off the reflected glory of the Iliad,of which it is an adaptation. Troy, which sunk in somewhere between 175 and 250 million dollars, triesto create a bright, glowing, but not altogether truthful, vision of the world that the Greeks and the Trojanslived in. It opens with the campaign of Agamemnon (Brian Cox) against Thessaly in his attempt to unify Greece.Agamemnon succeeds in this campaign with the help of Achilles (Brad Pitt), the mightiest of the Greekwarriors. The movie then cuts to Paris (Orlando Bloom) and Hector (Eric Bana), and Paris’ seduction andabduction of Helen (Diane Kruger). Helen is already married to Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson), and an outragedMenelaus discovers the lovers’ flight too late. He convinces his brother Agamemnon to march against Troy.Agamemnon uses the opportunity to unify the Greeks in a common cause and to destroy Troy, a potentialpolitical threat. And so, are launched a thousand ships to take the topless towers of Troy.

Achilles 

The Trojan war is, of course, Achilles' star turn, and Brad Pitt's impeccable pecs are on full display. Themovie covers most of the ground of the Iliad. Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel over a slave girl - Pittin a sleek leather tank-top; Achilles withdraws from the Greek army - Pitt without a shirt on; Patroclus(Garrett Hedlund) impersonates Achilles but meets his death; Achilles returns to the Greek army, and duelswith Hector - Pitt the all-American Achilles. Pitt’s attitude and body language, though, are all wrong. His over-choreographedbattles seem inspired less by Achilles than by Akshay.

The war draws to its inevitable close. Wolfgang Petersen has taken liberties with tradition in the adaptationof the story of the Trojan war. Troy has, for instance, completely done away with the gods in the plot,perhaps for reasons of greater realism. The images of the gods and goddesses in the Iliad are ones oftimeless beauty ("Think of lightning : Hera's rich hair streams in the sky when her husband buildsstorms"). Although many of these are missing from the movie, Troy compensates with otherimages of beauty. The scenes from Greece and Troy are beautifully recreated - the ships, the swords, theshields. The streets and the scenes of Troy are well-imagined (only problem : they are, well, imagined - theexcavations in Turkey reveal Troy to be a city of stone houses and pathways - more Montezuma's Tenochtitlanthan Haroun Al Rashid's Baghdad).

Besides aesthetics, the Greek gods play a major role in the narrative of the Iliad. They were the verycause of the war, and variously take the Greek (Athena, Hera, Poseidon) and the Trojan (Apollo, Artemis,Aphrodite, Ares) sides. The Greek gods take sides out of jealousy and filial obligation, to be sure ("Poseidonwas pulsing with anger. His son's son had fallen… He went through the ships and huts to rally the Greeks….").However, the gods are, at some level, the personification of values, such as righteousness and justice. Thedivided allegiance of the gods recalls to a certain extent the Mahabharata. In the Mahabharata,Balarama and Krishna - two avatars of Vishnu himself - take different sides (although Balarama later gave wayto Buddha as an avatar of Vishnu, as Hinduism tried to expand to include Buddhism). This divided allegiance issymptomatic of the lack of moral clarity in war, where both sides must take lives, and of the nuanced natureof good and evil. The Bhagavadgita examines the moral issues of going to war, and gives the Mahabharataphilosophical profundity, but with a two-and-a-half-hour format, Troy may perhaps be excused from suchexploration.

Where Troy fails is in its depiction of the war. The audience walks away with an impression of a quick,short war, but the Trojan War was a draining, dirty, blood-soaked affair fought over ten years. While theIliad tried to glorify its heroes, we also see in it scenes of utter despair ("My friend is dead,Patroclus, my dearest friend of all. I loved him, and I killed him."), of disease ("So[Apollo] struck the Greek camp with plague, And the soldiers were dying"), of mass death on thefront-lines ("You could hear their screams as they floundered And were whirled around in theeddies.") and of sadistic, blatant and wanton abuse ("[Achilles] pierced the tendons abovethe heels and cinched them with leather thongs to his chariot"). The Trojan War ultimately became -one hates to use the Q word - a quagmire.

Quagmire. Fallujah. Wanton abuse. Abu Ghraib. Mass death. Najaf. We know the flashing images of war as theyappear to us daily. Troy glosses over the pain and brutality of war. Troy is not honest to thestory it is trying to tell. We know that the pictures of abuses and torture from Abu Ghraib, those of theflag-draped coffins of American soldiers and the video of the beheading of Nick Berg by Al Qaeda terroristsare only prologues to stories of great individual tragedies. Troy correctly points out that the talk ofhonour and country (think "USA Patriot"ism) masks something else - a quest for glory and power (think ofWolfowitz-Libby’s project for a New American Century, a plan to project American dominance over theentire 21st century). Troy chooses to ignore the horror and focus on the glory - of "MissionsAccomplished". Troy chooses not to trouble itself with issues about the morality of warfare, but ifyou are interested in some uncomplicated stuff, it will do the trick. Something tells me President Bush isgoing to love this one.

Anand Manikutty is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and is a database softwareengineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of the upcoming book "Nothing in Excess".

 Quotations from The Iliad by Homer translated by Stanley Lombardo.