Nolan Got Agamemnon Wrong Too (Kinda)

After months of speculation and mouth-frothing anger from internet movie critics and lovers of the Western canon, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has hit theaters, and the consensus from most viewers seems to be "It's good, but I'm still mad about black Helen of Troy. And the 5'1 manlet who once played a pregnant teen."

In addition to the comparisons against the source material, Homer's epic poem of the same name, critics have also been comparing Nolan's film to Troy (2003). You may remember that glorious, sun-baked retelling of the Iliad starring Brad Pitt's magnificent cakes. I certainly do.

Yet somehow, no one, and I mean no one, seems to remember that there was another Homer adaptation released just before Troy hit theaters. And in my own humble opinion, it was a better adaptation with bolder narrative choices, and is a better jumping-off point for people wanting to hold up a comparison point for Nolan's work.

Many years ago, I spent my afternoons watching The 4400, a series on USA Network. It was a good show, but I'll be damned if every single commercial break wasn't filled with ads for their upcoming Helen of Troy miniseries. It was to star some slender blonde with an amazing keaster (the finest ever shown on network tv, perhaps), and Rufus Sewell, the bad guy from A Knight's Tale.

I got so sick of the ads, I decided to watch the damn thing out of spite. Surely that would appease the USA Network overlords. It was only two episodes and shot in Malta on what was clearly a television budget. I had no expectations.

Then Rufus Sewell walked on screen as Agamemnon, and something in my brain broke in a way that has never fully healed.

All those violent, morally gray alpha males in the dark romance books these days are trying to be what Sewell put on screen in Helen of Troy, and they all fall short. The smolder, my God.

Sewell plays Agamemnon, a man who is, by any reasonable moral accounting, one of the worst people in the world. Like in the original poem, Agamemnon kills his own daughter, Iphigenia, to win favor from the gods and sail his fleet to Troy successfully. He also wages the decade-long Trojan war out of an obsession with Helen (a departure from most other adaptations). His final act in the story is the sexual assault of the woman he's been fixated on since the first scene. And Sewell is so handsome, so commanding, so entirely in control of every frame he occupies, that you understand on a gut level exactly how men like this accumulate power. You watch him and you get it. People followed this guy willingly. Even after they watched him murder his own kid. That's the whole goddamn problem, and the miniseries knows it.

I want to talk about a version of Homer that very few saw and fewer seem to remember, that you can't stream or buy digitally anywhere in the United States as of this writing, and that understood something about Agamemnon that neither Nolan nor the $200 million Troy (2004) was willing to explore.

Three Agamemnons

Every adaptation of the Trojan War has to answer a question about Agamemnon, even if it answers by refusing to engage. The question is this: the myth says he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis in exchange for favorable winds to sail to Troy. What do you do with that?

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