“Hear me sing of the wrath of Achilles,
How he gave the Achaeans the willies.
  Hear me tell, oh my muse,
  Of how Troy got the goose,
And of quarrels that really were dillies.”

  — Translation of first lines of the Iliad
    by Poul Anderson & Gordon R. Dickson

After the success of Gladiator, the historical spectacular seems to be coming back into style, thanks to the wonders of CGI, which can reproduce the ancient world for us just as well as it can show us various future ones. Later this season we’ll be seeing King Arthur, and today I saw my first trailer for Alexander (the Great, of course).

However, this season started out its historicals with a remake of The Iliad. One presumes that Homer has not collected any royalties (though there is a story that one Hollywood mogul, seeing a preview screening of the film, ordered his minions to find the author’s agent; he wanted an option on the guy’s next novel!).

We start with a quick overview of very ancient Greek history. Agamemnon (Brian Cox) wants to conquer the ancient world; his brother Menelaos of Sparta (Brendan Gleeson) simply wants to sit by his fire in peace, and towards this purpose he receives two envoys from Troy (the “Ilium” of the Iliad), the brothers Hector (Eric Bana) and Paris (Orlando Bloom), sons of King Priam. Hector, who is a warrior, wants nothing more than to go home to his wife and raise his child in the same peace that Menelaos will enjoy; Paris wants nothing much except Menelaos’s wife Helen (Diane Kruger), who in turn develops a thing for Paris, and runs off with him to Troy. You may imagine that this ticks off Menelaos, who goes to his brother and complains; and Agamemnon wants nothing more than the conquest of Troy. The rest of the film covers the war that rages across the beaches and lowlands between the Greek ships (probably the full thousand, thanks to the wonder of CGI) and the walls of Troy.

Hmmm, I haven’t even mentioned Achilles (Brad Pitt) yet, though the movie is primarily about him and his rivalry with Hector. Achilles, leader of the Myrmidons, is a perfect killing machine who would much rather rest in his tent (with a woman) than go out killing. Early in the battle he takes Hector’s cousin, the priestess Briseis, captive, but Agamemnon, as High King of Mycenae, confiscates this prize, which leads to Achilles’ famous sulk and Greek reverses before Troy. It is only after Hector’s victory over, and killing of, Achilles over-ambitious cousin Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund) that Achilles gets back into the battle. But the final victor over Troy is Achilles’ friend, the wanax (king) of Ithaca, Odysseus (Sean Bean), who comes up with the famous wooden-horse trick.

This isn’t really the Iliad, of course. The half of that famous poem given over to the machinations of the gods of the Olympian pantheon is completely excised; there are no divine or supernatural manifestations in this film (even Cassandra, who truth-to-tell didn’t have all that great a role in the original story, is gone). A couple of decades of warfare are, for dramatic reasons, reduced to a couple of weeks. Agamemnon dies in the end, thus depriving Euripides and others of later theatrical material. There is a quick nod to Vergil in one scene near the end (perhaps Wolfgang Petersen is already planning a film presentation of the Aeneid).

But, by and large, I enjoyed this film (though I kept expecting Odysseus and Paris to meet, look at each other for a moment, and then exclaim simultaneously: “Don’t I know you from somewhere???”)