Movie Gazette

“Will strangers hear our names long after we're gone, and wonder who we were?”, asks the voice-over at the beginning of Wolfgang Petersen's 'Troy', and then at the end answers with “These names will never die”. Characters in 'Troy' bang on a lot about the eternal fame of their names, and this is just as well – for while the film is based not so much on real events as on a cherished myth of the ancient Greeks (especially the version told by Homer), it often seems that the names are the only thing that have been remembered.

Although you would not know it from seeing this film, in the traditional legend Achilles (here played by Brad Pitt) is not on the first boat to land at Troy, he is never on friendly terms with Odysseus, and he dies long before the sack of Troy. Ajax dies by his own hand after losing a contest for the armour of dead Achilles. Paris does not survive the Trojan war, while both Menelaus and Agamemnon do, and Helen ends up returning to Sparta with her former husband. Most importantly of all, the siege of Troy lasts ten whole years, whereas Petersen's Troy is a shock-and-awe campaign lasting only sixteen days and a night (and that's including the twelve-day truce for Hector's funeral games), in which there is not really enough time for anyone to earn the kind of honour that makes legends.

Does any of this really matter? After all, Homer's 'Iliad' focuses on only a few weeks in the middle of the decade-long war (although his genius manages to encapsulate the essence of the whole war, and indeed all wars, in that brief space) – and in any case his Troy is only the first written version of many from the ancient world, some of which are wildly inventive. Troy belongs to everybody, and is up for grabs, so there is nothing intrinsically wrong with making changes for the film. The decision, for example, to keep the Homeric gods as strictly absent, unseen figures (apart from Achilles' mother Thetis, whose divinity is at least implied), while still peppering the dialogue with references to them, is a neat compromise between Homer's divine machinery and the scepticism of our own age.

'Troy' was never intended to be a straightforward adaptation of Homer's 'Iliad' – instead it is, to use the wording of the final credits, 'inspired' by it. The problem is, however, that there is little sign of any 'inspiration' here, from either Homer or the Muses. As Hector (Eric Bana) tells his brother Paris (Orlando Bloom) in an early scene, there is nothing 'poetic' in death – not of course true of Homer's epic, which is all about the poetic possibilities of death, but true enough of a film whose lines are largely banal hokum and whose characters are cardboard cutouts (despite valiant efforts from some of the actors). The reason that Homer's name will always be remembered alongside the names of his epic heroes is that he made Troy an arena of unforgettable depth and grandeur. Wolfgang Petersen's name, however, is more likely to be remembered for 'Das Boot' than for this sword-and-sandaller, which for all its impressive CGI fleets and armies, is sublime only in its averageness.