"Troy" (2004) vs "Helen of Troy" (2003)

A few days ago I was sick and I was looking for something I could watch while sitting around coughing and sipping tea so I, unfortunately, came upon Helen of Troy. I wasn't sensible enough to realize that it was a US miniseries, so I for some reason assumed that it was a BBC miniseries and I actually had hope that it would be good... maybe even better than Troy, I thought to myself.

Not so much.

I'll begin with a bit of a rant about Helen of Troy (2003) and then get down to actually comparing the two. I had to re-watch Troy just to erase the damage this miniseries did to me. The rant contains spoilers for Helen of Troy(2003), not that you should ever consider watching this thing.

SPOILERS AND A RANT AHEAD

Helen of Troy follows the lives of Helen and Paris from a young age. Paris is shown being born, and, because of a vague prophecy by his sister, sent to be thrown off a cliff, despite his mother's wailing protests. As can be expected, the guy they sent to throw him off the cliff doesn't have the heart to go through with it and instead decides to raise the boy himself, giving him the love that his parents denied him. He then grows up herding goats and training horses and he grows to hate the people sent by kings to oppress peasants and such. This is nice and everything, but the problem is that they fail to actually follow through with the character development that this set-up implies.

As soon as Paris gets a whiff of the fact that he's actually the King's son he joins them all and automatically assimilates into the life of nobility which he supposedly despised two seconds ago and forgets all about that poor old guy that, you know, ONLY raised him like a father! Also, the King accepts him without any issues even though he was the one who ordered him killed based on the prophecy. And one of the characters even SAYS to him "you never really believed in the prophecy" - SO WHY DID HE TELL THE DUDE TO THROW HIM OFF A CLIFF AS A BABY?!!!!

Let's leave Paris' story alone before this becomes too much of a rant. Helen's story is even worse. She looks like she's over 30, but everyone keeps calling her a child. She gets kidnapped by this random old dude who tells her her father isn't really her father and that's why he doesn't like her much, and then suddenly she's practically begging that old dude to marry her and he goes "no, you're a child." I would like to understand why he kidnapped her in the first place. Also, she's not a child, she's in her thirties. Anyway, then her brother finds her and kills her kidnapper and dies himself. Poor Helen. Her father (or not?) the king of Sparta then basically gives her to a bunch of random kings and asks them if any of them will have her and bring ruin unto himself or whatever. We have this really awkward scene where all these kings are looking at her and we're supposed to be convinced that she's the most beautiful woman in the world and they ALL want her.

Somehow I don't think the ancient Greeks' concept of ultimate beauty was an anorexic 30 something woman who bounced around like a spoiled child, but hey, you never know. Throughout this conversation the one clear message we're supposed to be getting is that all these men are brutes and it's very unfair and the only remotely decent guy among them is Menelaus because he has this outburst where he tells them they don't have the right to sit there and decide who will have her based on a drawing lots. Then he ends up being bullied into cooperating with the lots thing and he ends up winning her. So Helen ends up with the one decent guy. Yay, right? *sigh* No actually, for some inexplicable reason Menelaus decides that Helen is going to be ordered to walk among all the spartan men completely naked. Let's move past the part where she's ok with this after having her "willful character" shoved down our throats for the past like hour and a half of this movie. I thought Menelaus was supposed to the decent one! (Personally, I think the only reason they had this scene is because the producers of the show wanted to film some naked scenes.)

From here on the story basically is at the same point where Troy (2004) started off.

/Spoilery Rant part of this post.

So basically, Helen of Troy spent over an hour trying to develop the characters of Helen and Paris so that we like them instead of seeing Paris as a selfish idiot and Helen as an adulterous fool/troublemaker. We're supposed to feel like Paris is the underdog character that we should root for and Helen is this beautiful tragic character who has such an unfair life because she's a woman and so on. The problem is, though, that for all the time spent on this the miniseries completely fails where it comes to characterization. It's not about the amount of time you spend with a character, it's about showing us their motivations, helping us understand their feelings and most of all, making their characters consistent. There has to be follow-through for each of the events and influences that a character encounters otherwise they're not real characters.

This is what Troy did much more effectively. With just one look, a couple of lines of dialogue, we sympathize much more with Hector and Achilles and all the other characters. Without being beat over the head repeatedly with how beautiful Helen is and how all the men want her we see and understand Menelaus' anger and his desire to wage a war to get her back. We feel his injured pride. We see the tension between him and his brother in their first exchange without a word being said about it. Hector's short conversation with Paris aboard the ship is a hundred times more effective than the stupid battle scene between them in Helen of Troy. Even Sean Bean's character Odysseus who doesn't play a huge role is a fully fleshed out character. I could go on. The point is that this movie perfectly demonstrates that minutes and hours of telling can't replace five seconds of well-done showing.

When it comes to characterization Troy (2004) beats Helen of Troy (2003). It's not even a contest.

But what about the other stuff? I mean, after wading through minutes upon minutes of mindless nonsense about Helen and being hit with all the mindlessly pornographic nude scenes you'd think the Trojan War would be good. It was terrible. The characters continued to do pointless things that neither they nor the viewer cared about. Just compare Hector's death in both Helen of Troy and Troy. In Helen of Troy I was never given a reason to care for Hector in the first place. Then, suddenly the war happens and is he an awesome warrior that I can root for in the battle? Of course not. He just dies way too easily at the hands of Achilles for no reason whatsoever. Completely pointless waste of the viewer's time. It's actually very sad when you compare it to Hector's emotional death scene in Troy (2004). It doesn't take a huge budget to make us care, just some good writing and some actual motivations, but the writers of this show clearly had no time for such things. They were too busy trying to churn out this pointless script so that it would be ready in time to come out just before the much-anticipated Troy and make some cash off that anticipation.

This isn't the only time this has been done. The BBC made a wonderful adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby in 2001 and then in 2002 we suddenly get this American movie version which was just depressing to even contemplate (I watched the trailer and couldn't handle it anymore). Unfortunately, in the case of Nicholas Nickleby the superior BBC drama was overshadowed by the Hollywood version. It took me so long to even get my hands on a copy of the BBC version because everywhere I go the other film is taking up the shelf space instead.

In the case of the story of the Trojan war, however, it's clear which one is superior and I think the reception for both is very telling. To be honest, I don't remember liking the 2004 adaptation that much, but when compared to the horrible Helen of Troy it seems utter perfection! It does teach us a lesson, though: characterization is not about the time spent with a character, it's about how that time is used. What do you think? Have you seen both adaptations? What did you think of them?