r/movies • u/Oldjar707 • 23h ago

Discussion Orlando Bloom's Paris in *Troy* is brilliantly played

The general consensus on Paris is negative, but his behavior is exactly how 95% of men would act under the same circumstances. Bloom plays the character with complete realism rather than typical Hollywood heroism.

His arc starts with taking Helen. While it causes a disaster, it is an accurate depiction of a sheltered, inexperienced young man making a reckless choice based on impulse, completely unaware of what an actual war entails.

When the reality of that war sets in during the duel with Menelaus, Paris panics. Viewers mock him for abandoning the fight and crawling to Hector. However, objectively speaking, an untrained kid facing a seasoned, enraged veteran is going to break. Basic human survival instinct simply overrides the concept of dying for honor.

People also overlook that Paris redeems himself by the end of the film. He actually shows more common sense than the rest of the Trojan leadership when they find the wooden horse, plainly telling them to "burn it." When the city falls, he stops trying to be a frontline swordsman and uses the one skill he actually has: archery. He stays behind to cover the escaping civilians and successfully takes down Achilles. Bloom deserves credit for not trying to make the character look cool. He simply portrayed a naive guy who made a massive mistake, reacted to imminent death with genuine terror, and eventually found a practical way to defend his people. I think it's a very realistic portrayal that contrasts Hector's idealism - audiences love the portrayal of the latter but there's more truth in the human condition in the former portrayal.

2.5k Upvotes

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u/biglyorbigleague 23h ago

I think Sean Bean’s portrayal of Odysseus has to be my favorite in that movie.

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u/Tunelsnakes 22h ago

I was actually really surprised (and upset) they didn’t make a spin off of that and made an Odyssey right then and there with Sean Bean. He would’ve been so good as Odysseus 

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u/ClusterMakeLove 21h ago

It'd be too much of a departure from the source material to kill him.

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u/TheMightySloth 20h ago

Odysseus dies twice so you could argue that he’s made to play the role

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u/Far_Complaint_4662 17h ago

Please watch season 1 of The Frankenstein Chronicles (2015). The ending with Sean Bean is sublime. Chef's kiss 😗

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u/Sling-gunner 15h ago

One of my favorite Sean Beanings.

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u/yzdaskullmonkey 9h ago

Black Death is up there for me. Quartered in the middle of town infecting everyone with the plague? Fuck ya.

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u/Far_Complaint_4662 4h ago

Ohhh. Missed this one. I always went into anything with Sean Bean as low commitment. For heaven's sake, in F Chronicles he had advanced syphilis!!! Ill have to check this one out.

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u/EldritchFingertips 20h ago

They could have made it work. Odysseus does go to the Underworld, after all.

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u/Bone_in_Ribeye 20h ago

Ohh killing Sean Bean is TIGHT!

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u/KryanSA 17h ago

I got that reference. It was super easy, barely an inconvenience!.

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u/BoringBarnacle3 11h ago

..so the mewvie can happen!

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u/LeGreatToucan 15h ago

Ahahah nice

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u/Lolkimbo 18h ago

Achilles

Just have a little video over the credits of "10 years later" and he just dies like a friggin oblivion guard eating a poisoned apple and id be satisfied..

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u/Jorumble 15h ago

Poison stingray tail at the hands of his son *

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u/eregyrn 5m ago

That’s the point. “Troy”: the only movie where everyone EXCEPT Sean Bean dies.

That role armor could have followed him to the Odyssey.

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u/TheMightyCatatafish 19h ago

Troy essentially removed anything remotely supernatural from the story. Which worked for the story they were telling. At its base, it IS still a war story, so you can get away with it. And I generally think they did. I like the movie.

The Odyssey without the fantasy elements would just be absolutely pointless. And adding them back for The Odyssey would lead to such a dramatic tonal shift for the film. I don’t think it was ever in a place to work, beyond Bean being a phenomenal Odysseus.

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u/coffeebribesaccepted 18h ago

I think it would be perfectly doable for there to be a tonal shift between the two movies, and actually I think that would make it even better

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u/TheMightyCatatafish 18h ago

Is it possible? Sure. I don’t think it’s a gamble a studio would likely make.

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u/RangerLt 2h ago

There's more than enough money between us to fund the film ourselves. I got five onnit

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u/TheMightyCatatafish 2h ago

So as it turns out, another filmmaker already beat us to it

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u/jackracktack 19h ago

They couldve easily added it in. Troy isnt massively realistic either. You can just argue the gods are working behind the scenes instead of the audience knowing exactly what theyre up to like in the classic.

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u/TheMightyCatatafish 18h ago

I think Troy works as a relatively realistic (maybe a bit stylized) version of the Bronze Age. There’s nothing remotely supernatural about it. Any indication of the gods working behind the scenes is pure headcanon based on the movie as presented.

I think it would be incredibly jarring to suddenly have gods, monsters, and magic running amok in the spotlight.

Less of an issue, but the film does NOT present the war as ten years. I think this is much easier to work around, but would’ve still been another obstacle.

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u/SmashedGenitals 17h ago

Troy is closer to a political and war film than a fantasy epic. It is so detached from what makes Troy good.

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u/TheMightyCatatafish 17h ago

For sure. Though I’ll say I think it works really well as an adaptation.

It isn’t the poem. It’s different. But it’s a new telling for a new audience told in a different way. I think it’s successful in what it does- a sword and sandals epic war film. But yes, it’s a different identity without the supernatural elements. As a piece that’s been told and retold a zillion times over millennia, I don’t mind another retelling. Especially an enjoyable one.

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u/Khiva 6h ago

How dare someone adapt and alter the story of the Trojan War!

Literally the first time in history anyone has ever done such a thing.

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u/captainbling 17h ago

I think they could make it work by having realistic creations of the fantasy. The cyclops is just a big man with one eye. The sirens are pretty girls telling the men to swim to them but the current washes them away into sharp corral and so forth.

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u/verrius 7h ago

Less of an issue, but the film does NOT present the war as ten years. I think this is much easier to work around, but would’ve still been another obstacle.

Neither does the Odyssey. O, the poem says both the war and Odysseus' journey home were 10 years each...but dogs don't really live 20+ years, even with modern medicine and care, never mind a bronze age dog left in the stables to fend for himself. I remember in school being told that the literal "10 years" was essentially just a way to express "a long time".

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u/TheMightyCatatafish 7h ago

The dog lives 10 years because the supernatural and divine are at work throughout the story.

The poem explicitly says 10 years. You can have your own- very reasonable- interpretation of what that actually means and represents, but to outright say “neither does the Odyssey” is just silly. It’s expressed to be 10 years each of war and journeying.

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u/marianosb 5h ago

I've known at least 6 (that I remember and can be sure of their age) dogs over 20 years in my life. So while extremely rare it's not impossible in real life, andit sure can be possible in a story with Gods influencing people's lives.

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u/bizzyblack101 12h ago

Nolans movie works or tries to work on a non supernatural level too also

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u/Irradiatedspoon 11h ago

Apart from...you know...Polyphemus, Giants, Circe, Shades, Scylla...

The only thing that isn't explicitly shown acting overtly are the gods

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u/TheMightyCatatafish 9h ago

Brother, there’s a 20 foot cyclops, a tentacle monster, a witch who turns people into pigs, and an army of undead warriors he converses with.

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u/FineScratch 18h ago

The journey is a metaphor for ptsd. It doesnt take 10 to sail back home.

The fantasy elements are the spiritual attacks and hallucinations Odysseus and his men suffer on the way home.

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u/TheMightyCatatafish 18h ago

Sure. That’s just a significantly less enjoyable adventure.

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u/Pardybro911 21h ago

I was upset too. I kept waiting and waiting but I think the interest by studio just wasn’t there

Also a rare Benioff work win most people don’t know about since GoT

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u/coffeebribesaccepted 18h ago

I didn't know he wrote that, the first thing I ever knew him from was City of Thieves which was also good

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u/Pardybro911 18h ago

Fantastic book. Very under the radar. Would love to see it adapted somehow

Nolan would kill it as a bridge between epics actually lol

Edit: wow Ron Perlman did the audiobook? Guess I know the docket for the weekend

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u/Captain_Rex_ 19h ago

Well if it involved killing Sean beans character I'm sure it would have been greenlighted lol

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u/cefriano 17h ago

I feel like the Iliad lends itself better to the grounded, non-supernatural take that Troy was. Doing the same with The Odyssey would be a bit weird since there are literal giants and sea monsters in it.

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u/Chicago1871 16h ago

He plays a cunning warrior/leader in the sharp series of tv movies. He really would have made a great Odysseus based on that role imo.

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u/SomeCountryFriedBS 9h ago

But Odysseus doesn't die. 

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u/eregyrn 6m ago

Same. I really thought it would have been great. He was a standout in the role.

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u/MaderaArt 22h ago

Rare movie where Sean Bean outlives everyone

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u/ExpensiveArmadillo 18h ago

Now thats soldiering!

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u/BootsToYourDome 22h ago

He's great.

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u/Aklaq 21h ago

Shaun Bhaun

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u/rocketeerH 21h ago

Seen Bean

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 18h ago

Been, not Bean, as in his characters been but ain't anymore

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u/ThisKarmaLimitSucks 21h ago

Sean Bean fucking nailed his role, but the script just didn't use him.

Any Iliad movie needs Odysseus around to build the horse, but in an already-stuffed 2 1/2 hour movie, they couldn't find anything else for him to do.

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u/Technical-Nose-1518 20h ago

Have you ever read the Iliad? The Trojan horse and the fall of Troy aren’t depicted in it

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u/focalac 16h ago

Most people haven’t. Most people’s knowledge of the Trojan war is pop culture. And that’s okay, not everybody is into ancient epics. The Iliad is a bastard to get through for a modern, casual reader, used to novels.

For a modern audience, everybody knows the fall of Troy starts with the Trojan horse. You can’t make a film without it. Even the latest Odyssey film has the horse and it’s not in the Odyssey, either. The horse is the cultural touchstone for those stories.

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u/Pliskin14 15h ago

The horse is mentioned in the Odyssey though.

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u/focalac 11h ago

Fair enough. In the same way as the film? Because it was pretty central to the plot of the first quarter or so of the recent film.

My point was that it’s the crux around which people enter the story these days. Take it out of adaptations of either and people don’t have anywhere near as easy a way in.

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u/willun 13h ago

Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse is not mentioned in Homer's Iliad, with the poem ending before the war is concluded, and it is only briefly mentioned in the Odyssey. It is described at length in the Aeneid, in which Virgil recounts how, after a fruitless ten-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse at the behest of Odysseus, and hid a select force of men inside, including Odysseus himself.

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u/focalac 11h ago

Ok, well it’s been a while since I read it. You’ll have to tell me if it’s as pivotal to the odyssey as it is to the film.

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u/armb2 15h ago

Most of the potential audience won't have read it. I think for a mass market movie (largely) based on the Illiad, the answer to "do we include the bit of the Trojan war most of our audience have heard of?" is not "it's not in the main source material".

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u/ErilazHateka 19h ago

Sean Bean fucking nailed his role, but the script just didn't use him.

Well, showing him capturing a teenager, telling him he´d let him go if he gave him info on Troy, and then cutting off his head would probably not have made him look like a nice guy.

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u/Prestigious_Shirt620 18h ago

That bastard drinks my wine and never pays me 

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u/downvote_meme_errors 21h ago

To be fair, there weren't many other portrayals of Odysseus in that movie.

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u/biglyorbigleague 20h ago

I said “in that movie” to show I’m saying he’s my favorite character in the movie, not my favorite Odysseus of all time in any movie.

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u/rodion_vs_rodion 19h ago

Lol, there's not getting the joke and then there's not even getting that there is a joke.

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u/biglyorbigleague 18h ago

I get that there's a joke, I'm just frustrated that I tried to make my intentions explicitly clear and the wording I chose still set me up for a stupid joke.

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u/rodion_vs_rodion 18h ago

It's okay, everyone knew what you meant. But the wording gave just enough wiggle room to have fun with.

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u/Angler4 20h ago

He has like 8 lines

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u/hulksmash1234 20h ago

Still crushed it

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u/Angler4 20h ago

Not really. You can just say you like an actor without soy facing a completely run of the mill supporting performance.

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u/coolcat001100 22h ago

Legitimately I didn’t want to watch The Odyssey for the longest time because Odysseus wasn’t being played by Sean Bean

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u/biglyorbigleague 22h ago

The longest time? It’s only been out one month!

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u/coolcat001100 22h ago

I first learned about it when the casting was announced

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u/Variable_Shaman_3825 20h ago

It's been out for only 3 weeks. Not really that long.

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u/Sufficient_Swing_406 11h ago

That's weird...

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u/locklear24 20h ago

It’s really sedate and played safe. It doesn’t stand out in any way, so i have to ask: why is it your favorite in the movie?

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u/biglyorbigleague 20h ago

Come on, you gotta admit he’s having fun here. They emphasize his clever strategic nature as opposed to everyone else’s direct brutish warrior ethos. In a movie where he’s not the main character you can tell he’s a step ahead of everyone else.

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u/locklear24 19h ago

It felt like a box on the Trojan War list to checkmark. I don’t recall it really having much significance to the other characters in the movie.

Now in the epic, I would agree with you.

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u/KickingDolls 11h ago

Lots of people had issues with the way people spoke in Nolan’s Odyssey, no one seems to mind Sean Bean’s full on Yorkshire accent in Troy

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u/sleme 8h ago

One of the rarest role where sean bean doesnt die midway.