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WHERE ARE THE GODS?: Troy movie snark.
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mirrored_echo is currently over and the two of us are watching-slash-snarking Troy, which is riddled with historial inaccuracies that are barely compensated for by pretty boys in skirts. Also, I'm spelling Akhilles with the k because I got told ages ago that's how it meant to be spelt, and it kind of stuck with me.Akhilles: *is woken up with girl to go out to fight as Aggie's champion*
1. WRONG. He wasn't supposed to have been heard of before Troy. He was kept hidden away as a girl and then Oddie-baby pulled a fast one by hiding some weapons amongst girl-toys and then causing a disturbance, IDing Akhilles when he was the one that picked up the weapons to fight. There is no way that he was some famous warrior person.
2. Dude. They cut out ALL the backstory! Where's the bit about Paris being abandoned as a baby because it was predicted that he'd bring Troy's downfall?
3. Where's Paris judging between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite and thus pissing off the first two and getting Aphrodite promising him Helen?
4. WHERE ARE THE GODS?
5. Bloom's prettier as Paris than as Legolas. But that's not a historical inaccuracy so instead, how about Helen's line, "I was a ghost"? She was the bloody QUEEN. Men vied to marry her! SHE was the one who had Sparta as a dowry, not Menelaus. He got Sparta because he MARRIED her and she CHOSE him.
6. He should have still been a shepherd when he was ten,
mirrored_echo says. I'm inclined to agree with her. Did they just cut out his backstory ENTIRELY?7. Paris has a very, very smooth chest.
mirrored_echo doesn't think that guys back then waxed their chests, had elaborately beaded hair or wore eyeliner (personally, I think that he pulls it off rather yummily but this is the 'WHERE ARE THE GODS' entry, not the 'Bloom makes eyeliner and skirts look good' entry).8. This isn't about AGGIE being a good leader. The deal was that when everyone came to marry Helen, all the other kings would have to agree to guard Helen if she was ever kidnapped by anyone. They're oath-bound.
9.
mirrored_echo says that they're trying too hard to make Aggie unlikeable. I think that since the guy sacrificed his own daughter for a fair wind to blow them to Troy for MORE killing, he's unlikeable to start out with but GUESS WHAT THEY CUT OUT OF THE MOVIE?10. Hah. Cousin. They are SO cousins. *rolls eyes* Yeah. Right. CANON SLASH, where is it?
11. This is so not how Oddie-baby got Akhilles involved.
12.
mirrored_echo: They weren't Greeks back then. Greece wasn't a nation back then.13.
mirrored_echo wants to know why Akhilles' mother has grey hair. Clearly, it's because she's NOT A GODDESS. And yet she can still predict Akhilles' fate. Fantastic.Laptop died. Snark picks up again at the battle where Patroclus dresss up like his gay lover.
14. Pattycake should have been given permission to dress up in that armor by Akhilles to lead the M&Ms, not done it of his own accord.
15. ...That is a seriously nice back-bend. Fuck spines-don't-work-that-way. And okay, so that wasn't historically inaccurate but
mirrored_echo and I both had to comment on it. But the 'cousin' comment totallly was stupid. And again, Akhilles KNEW the Myrmidons were going off to fight.16. Tunnel? What the hell? Hector's wife is TAKEN CAPTIVE when the war ends. And his baby is killed by being thrown off the walls of Troy.
17. Also, randomly, the Illiad only started nine years into the war, didn't it? This movie is really, really condensed.
18. What, no shiny new magical armor for Akhilles? WHERE ARE THE GODS?!
19. Cassandra is the chick that could see the future. Briseis is the chick that Aggie and Akhilles argued over. Chryseis is the chick that was a priestess of Apollo. They are not the same girl. Did Hollywood use up so much money on the extras and fight scenes that they didn't have the dough to just hire two more actresses? Or were all the females in Hollywood wise enough to stay away from this movie except for two?
20. Akhilles needs to invest in a good megaphone. And he met Hector in battle, not screaming for him
mirrored_echo just asked if Akhilles wouldn't be hoarse by now.21. Yay, dancing with spears! This fight is really an excuse to show off Brad Pitt's underarm hair and leg muscles, isn't it? And okay, good, at least they're keeping in the chariot scene with Hector's body though, but GODS, that girl is annoying.
22. If you look at Akhilles from the waist down, it's like he's dressed in a PVC miniskirt and hooker boots. Which counts as a historical inaccuracy complaint because they didn't have PVC back then but I'm not complaining too much because, well, it's pretty. Most of the movie's pretty, actually.
mirrored_echo just had to leave to make sure she got to class tomorrow so the rest of it is done on my own.23. Where is Cassandra? WHERE ARE THE GODS?!
24. Isn't Hector supposed to get dragged around at daybreak and dusk for three days before Priam manages to intervene?
25. Briseis doesn't need to be freed like that! She's not the temple-priestess whose capture was the cause of APOLLO SENDING A PLAGUE DOWN ON THE GREEKS.
26. Briseis should stay with Akhilles. Doesn't she get tossed onto his funeral pyre when he's killed?
27. Aggie, don't invoke the gods. They're not here! The movie has cut them out entirely and frankly, at this point, even divine intervention wouldn't save this sorry story.
28. Akhilles sends his posse home, what the fuck? NO. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred and his wife's neck looks scarily long.
29. Uh. Akhilles never makes it inside the gates of Troy. He's meant to have been shot in the ankle and ALREADY be dead.
30. Also, plague happened earlier. Much earlier. It had nothing to do with the so-called Greeks sailing home.
31. Paris is supposed to be dead already as well. Got a wound, wound festered, died slowly and Helen got married off to someone else in the family.
32. Akhilles shouldn't be running around looking for Briseis because he's DEAD and so's she. Oy.
33. Aeneas is part of the royal family by marriage. Shouldn't Paris know his name? But yay for at least getting that right.
34. Paris is meant to be already dead, not making some sort of final stand. OY.
35. Aggie tries to take CASSANDRA, not Briseis! And he succeeds. Aggie doesn't die! He goes home and gets killed by his wife!
36. Pais also doesn't kill Akhilles because they're both DEAD by then! Not to mention one arrow to the heel should have killed him as opposed to becoming a pincushion.
37. ...They totally left out the Amazons and Akhilles raping the corpse of Penthesilia. Really. They went "Let them say I lived in the time of Hector, tamer of horses. Let them say I lived in the time of Akhilles," and I addded on, "Raper of corpses."
First time I saw the movie in a theatre, I counted 34 errors on my own through the entire movie. Now, only snarking maybe half of it, I managed to rack up 37 errors with
mirrored_echo snarking all except the last 35 minutes with me.Amazing.
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That said, there were a couple of things about the film that didn't really bother me - Achilles/Patroculus isn't as universally canon in Greek mythology as people really give it credit, and Achilles and Patroculus are often noted as being as cousins regardless of the status of their romantic relationship ^^. Sort of like Alexander - it's only later history that implies he had a sexual relationship with men, there is really nothing really at all from the earlier historians to suggest such a thing. Cassandra to me isn't anywhere as near as important an admission as Helenus (her twin brother) who the Greeks couldn't have defeated Troy without. I don't mind the exclusion of the Gods either (although I was hoping for both Apollo and Helenus, because they so obviously had something going on) as you can tackle the story of Troy either from a historical base or a mythological one and I didn't see it as much of a problem that they chose the former.
How history in general treats the Trojan War is really quite fascinating in itself. Shakespeare and co based their Trojan War related works on a totally different retelling of the Trojan War to the one we know through Homer - it's only fairly recently that the Homer version of the story has come back into favor ^^
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I was a major Greek mythology fan as a kid, and I do mean a kid. Seriously, my parents thought that since it was the 'classics', it would be safe for me to read, so here was this little six-year-old reading about rape and bestiality and necrophilia when they wouldn't even let her read Sweet Valley High at the age of twelve. Penthesilia's rape is therefore scarred into my head for life, along with the fact that Achilles and Patroclus were totally gay for each other. *snickers* Though that could also be the fault of my classical Greek mythology prof -- I knew I was going to love the course when she tangented onto them during a discussion of naming practices and Cleopatra/Patroclus. Cassandra's important to me because dude, she foresaw the fall of Troy, she knew what was going to happen with Helen, and the movie needed more girl chars anyway since it only had two main female leads. Cassandra's important enough to get taken home with Aggie, after all! Except not, because he dies in the movie. I swear, that death was just BWUAH for me. It's like, I don't know, Judas suddenly going, "Hey, changed my mind, someone nail ME up to that cross instead" and Jesus surviving. No offense to Christians meant, obviously.
I tend to treat Troy more as a myth than an actual historical event since that's how I was introduced to it, and part of my dislike of the omission of the gods comes from Paris' fight with Melelaus. Seeing him grovel at Hector's feet to be spared --- OY. It would have been so much less painful if 'dite had just snatched him up and transported him away like she should have. Really, I cringed for him when I saw that scene.
...Menelaus shouldn't have died either. It's like the whole 'Haldir Lives!' movement except not because nobody really cares about him when he's a fat pig of a man anyway.
*nods* I'm used to the Homeric version with a side of Euri, but I totally cheated as a kid and read all sorts of different versions because prose was easier for me than epic verse. I think that I only actually read the Illiad and Odyssesy much later on, by which time I already knew the whole plot anyway.
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WHERE ARE THE GODS <- SO TRUE XD. Makes me laugh so hard.