Troy

Prince Paris of Troy travels to Sparta on what is meant to be a peace mission, and falls in love with Helen, the wife of the Spartan king, Menelaus. Against all sense, Paris takes Helen back to Troy with him. Menelaus is humiliated and furious, and turns to his brother, Agamemnon — the most powerful king in Greece, ambitious for conquest far beyond one insult. Agamemnon has long wanted an excuse to bring the wealthy city of Troy under his control, and Helen's abduction gives him exactly that.

Agamemnon assembles an enormous alliance of Greek kings and their armies, including the invincible warrior Achilles, who fights less out of loyalty to Agamemnon — whom he despises — than for personal glory that will outlast his own life. The Greek fleet crosses the sea and lands on the beach beneath Troy's walls. Troy's king, Priam, and his elder son, Hector — a disciplined, honourable soldier who begged Paris not to bring Helen home in the first place — must now defend the city against a war none of them chose.

What follows is not a quick raid but a long, grinding siege: years of battles beneath towering walls that never fall by force alone.

Achilles' pride is wounded when Agamemnon claims Briseis, a captured Trojan priestess Achilles has come to care for, as his own prize. Furious and disgusted at fighting for a king he considers unworthy, Achilles withdraws from the battle entirely and refuses to fight, no matter how badly the Greeks need him.

Desperate to turn the battle and impatient to prove himself, Achilles' young cousin Patroclus secretly borrows his armour and leads Achilles' fierce soldiers, the Myrmidons, into combat disguised as Achilles himself. Believing he is finally facing his greatest rival, Hector duels and kills him — only afterwards discovering, in horror, that he has killed a boy wearing another man's armour.

Achilles' wrath is now absolute. He returns to the battlefield, hunts Hector down before the walls of Troy, and kills him in single combat as Hector's family watches from above. Not satisfied even with this, Achilles drags Hector's body behind his chariot in the dust — until, in one of the story's most human moments, King Priam himself walks alone into the enemy camp at night to beg, face to face, for his son's body back.

Years of siege have exhausted both sides, and Troy's walls have never once been breached by force. The cunning Greek king Odysseus proposes a trick instead of another assault: the Greeks will pretend to abandon the war and sail away, leaving behind an enormous wooden horse as a supposed offering to the gods — with a company of soldiers concealed inside it. Believing the war finally over, the jubilant Trojans drag the horse inside their own walls to celebrate.

That night, the hidden soldiers climb out and open Troy's gates from within, letting the returned Greek army pour into the sleeping city. What follows is chaos and slaughter: Troy burns, Priam is killed at his own altar, and Paris — in the story's sharpest reversal — kills the supposedly invincible Achilles with an arrow to his one vulnerable spot, his heel.

Amid the destruction, a handful of Trojans escape the burning city, carrying what they can save of their people's future beyond the fall of Troy itself. A ten-year war, provoked by one stolen queen, ends not in open battle but in a single, devastating act of deception.

For a very long time, educated opinion treated the Trojan War as pure literary invention, with no more historical reality than the gods who fight alongside the humans in Homer's poem. That changed in the 1870s, when the German businessman-turned-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, working with the British archaeologist Frank Calvert — who had already identified the site and owned part of it — excavated a mound called Hisarlik, on the coast of modern-day Turkey. Digging down through its many layers, Schliemann uncovered the remains of a real, ancient walled city that had been destroyed by fire.

This does not prove that Achilles, Hector or Helen ever existed, or that events unfolded exactly as Homer describes. What it does prove is that a real city stood on that spot, was fortified against attack, and did burn — evidence that something historical almost certainly lies behind the legend, even if the poem itself is not a reliable eyewitness account. Schliemann's own methods were far from perfect — his enormous trenches actually destroyed some of the very archaeological layers later scholars most wanted to study — but the discovery permanently changed how historians treat the legend.

Three changes matter most. First, Wolfgang Petersen's Troy removes the Greek gods entirely, presenting an entirely human war. In Homer's Iliad, the gods are not background decoration — they are central characters, constantly intervening: deflecting spears, inspiring rage, even carrying heroes physically off the battlefield. Cutting them out makes the film feel more realistic, but it also removes the poem's whole argument about fate, divine favour and human powerlessness.

Second, the film compresses a war the tradition says lasted ten years into what feels like a few weeks of screen time — necessary for a two-hour film, but a huge distortion of the original story's scale and exhaustion.

Third, the film kills off two major characters who survive in the ancient tradition. In the film, Hector kills Menelaus in single combat, and Briseis kills Agamemnon during the fall of the city. In the myths, both men survive the war: Menelaus reclaims Helen and returns home to Sparta with her, while Agamemnon returns home to Mycenae in triumph — only to be murdered there, in peacetime, by his own wife, Clytemnestra.