I recently saw Troy, the Wolfgang Peterson epic based loosely on The Iliad. I went into the theater expecting to be disappointed and I was not let down.

Some of the elements of the movie were just plain comical like the "Port of Sparta" (Sparta is in the middle of the Peloponnese peninsula and landlocked. Peterson could have meant the port of Cranae, but why not say it?) And the sun rising over the plains of Troy which face west was absurd (I've stood on the plains of Troy, and I have a good sense of direction). And Odysseus certainly did not get his idea for the Trojan Horse from seeing a foot soldier whittling one. Paris comes into Helen's boudoir at the beginning of the flick, Helen turns to him and says, "Last night was a mistake." Oh, come on. The fact that Achilles is far better looking than that Paris is something we just meant to ignore, I suppose. Helen didn't leave with Paris for his sparking wit.

Then Peterson takes a few liberties with the story. Let me give you a few examples. The Greeks decide to go war and the next thing you see is a flotilla of ships heading out to Asia Minor. What about the ten years the Greeks spent at Aulis waiting for a favorable wind? (And the war takes ten more years, so the characters would have aged two decades by the time Troy finally falls to tickery). What about Agamemnon sacfricing his daughter Iphegenia to appease the gods, who were notably absent from the picture? What about Achilles trying to save Iphegenia which set the tone for the conflict between him and Agamemnon during the war?. Hector kills Menelaus ending a duel that was supposed to be between Paris and the Spartan king, but in the literature, Menelaus survives the war. He is visited later by Telemachus, the son of Odysseus in The Odyssey. (That's Book 4, in case you're scoring at home.) Priam's wife Hecuba is cut out of the story enitrely, as is his daughter Cassandra, a pivotal player in the real narrative. Then at the end, when the Trojans are fleeing, Peterson takes a page out of Virgil's Aeneid by including a young Aeneas who takes instruction from Paris to go forth and found a new Troy, which he does, according to legend, on the River Tiber in the Italian peninsula. But in myth, Aeneas was not a young man during the war, he was one of the major warriors and when he flees, he does does so carrying his father Anchises on his shoulders, not the work of the young man pictured in the movie.

Am I nitpicking? Maybe. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. A real classicist could cut this film ribbons, and deservedly so. Why does Hollywood have an obligation to get it right? Because more and more people in the world are relying on movies for facts. How many people are actually going to take the time to read The Iliad let alone learn ancient Greek and read the material in the original? Hollywood therefore needs to be more circumspect than ever about putting out crap like this that hoi polloi will take for authenic.