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When it comes to adapting the epics, you can’t get much bigger or bolder than the BBC’s lavish eight-hour plunge into the fall of Troy. Long before the creation of the camera, scripts or decent lighting, this was a story that fascinated storytellers and audiences. It is the subject of a vast body of Greek literature, including The Iliad, which can be traced to the stonkingly fresh date of at least the eighth century BCE. But unless you’ve accidentally found yourself in Classics (blink twice if you need someone to rescue you), few know the tale of Trojan war in all its detail, making a big-budget screen adaptation a more appealing place to start. It’s little wonder that Troy: Fall of a City is a very old story draped in the bombast of its new visual medium.
Troy: Fall of a City remains faithful to the myth on many key points. Paris (Australian actor Louis Hunter) falls in love with Helen (Bella Dayne), after a strange incident involving the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite, in which he declares the latter the fairest on the promise that he will meet the most beautiful woman in the world. The only trouble is, Helen is already married to the proud Menelaus (Jonas Armstrong), king of Sparta, and when their affair becomes known, well war it is.
Just in case you thought this being the twenty-first century would mean we’d escaped that age-old propensity for the Gary Stu, within the first fifteen minutes Paris ditches his tousled cattle herding (you had one job, Paris), goes for a roll in the hay with an unnamed woman, steals a horse, races some warriors, gets into a fight, and discovers he’s actually a prince named Alexander. Troy’s King Priam (David Threlfall) and Queen Hecuba (Frances O’Connor) welcome him back with open arms, despite the fact that every other shot so far has been hell-bent on telling everyone – you, them, neighbouring livestock – that bad things are going to come of this, whether it’s visions of black blood, gloomy forests, or ominous music. Priam and Hecuba come from the ‘throw your hero into delicate and important situations without any training’ school of storytelling, so Paris is soon off to Sparta to engage in negotiations, ask pointed questions and make social faux pas like running off with your host’s breathy, stoner wife.
This would all be fine if we believed the love story of Helen and Paris, but between them they’ve got about as much personality as a small lizard. She may bear the face that launched a thousand ships and he the beard that graced a thousand hipsters, but not enough time is spent building up their supposedly earth-shattering romance. And let’s not even get started on their idiotic decision making and lack of motive. It seems that all the more interesting stories are going on in the background, like in the relationship between Hector (Tom Weston-Jones) and Andromache (Chloe Pirrie), or with Cassandra (Aimee Ffion-Edwards, best known as Esme in Peaky Blinders), cursed never to have her prophecies believed. Even the gods could’ve used more character development, as here they’re treated as real forces whose conflict arches over mortal squabbles. There is, however, one notably striking scene where they walk ethereally through the ranks of opposing sides in the first charge, picking out chosen heroes as they go.
On the Greek side, things are a little more dynamic. There’s some name-dropping of legendary heroes like Achilles (David Gyasi) and Aeneas (Alfred Enoch), but it’s Joseph Mawle (Game of Thrones’ Benjen Stark) who exudes presence as Odysseus. “No one wants this war,” says Odysseus, who’s quite hot for a near three thousand year-old mythical figure. When that war proves inevitable, his “I’ll be an old man before I see home again” is a prophetic touch probably helped by the existence of The Odyssey. Elsewhere in the Greek camp, they’re busy doing things like preparing for battle and engaging in human sacrifice, namely of leader Agamemnon’s (Johnny Harris) completely innocent daughter Iphigenia. It’s part of the myth and Harris does what he can to convey some searing emotion here, but it still suffers from issues of underdeveloped character and is something of a blight on an otherwise improved episode two.
Troy: Fall of a City does have some stunning moments of cinematography, much of it on location, beneath broad stretches of sky and amid whirling plumes of sand. The supporting cast do what they can with occasionally stiff moments of dialogue, and there have already been some scenes where Helen and Paris see the costly effects of war. There is still potential here, but if the series is to get audiences on its side, it’s certainly going to take more episodes than this.
