Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Introduction


The purpose of this blog is to compare and contrast the film Troy, directed by Wolfgang Petersen, and the epic poem it is based on, Homer's The Iliad. These two works, while similar, have significant differences in story, themes and character portrayal, etc., due to the fact that one is ancient and the other is modern. Thus, their target audiences are completely different; the culture they are each addressing is completely different; and the concepts of empathetic characters between each time period are completely different. The texts cater to these differences.

In other words, they were both written, designed, crafted for the purpose of entertainment – but the modern Western idea of entertainment is vastly different to what the Ancient Greeks' was. Because of this, Petersen felt it necessary to alter many aspects of the Iliad in his movie adaptation so that the latter would appeal more to a modern audience.

In the following posts, I will unpack these alterations.

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