Troy leaves Helen’s fate ambiguous after she escapes the city with Andromache, but her depiction in Greek mythology shows a very different ending.
The 2004 film Troy focuses on the violent aftermath of Helen's escape to Troy but never reveals what happened to her after Paris was killed and the city was sacked by the Greeks. Troy is loosely based on Homer's epic poem The Iliad, which narrates the quarrel between Achilles (Brad Pitt) and Agamemnon (Brian Cox) in the final weeks of the ten-year Trojan War. After Paris (Orlando Bloom) falls in love with the married Helen of Sparta (Diane Kruger), he smuggles her back to Troy with him and accidentally kicks off a violent and bloody war with the Greeks, led by her husband Menelaus.
Helen is a central figure in Troy and the Trojan War. After her escape from Sparta - portrayed in Troy as a fairly stable home, although Sparta is depicted in the movie 300 as cruel and ruthless - and Menelaus, Helen becomes a Princess of Troy and slowly begins to love her new city. Troy ends with Helen and her new sister-in-law Andromache helping the Trojans escape through tunnels beneath the city, and seems to imply that Helen stays with the Trojans afterward. Still, her fate at the end of Troy is unclear - so what actually happened to Helen after the Trojan War?
Troy 2004 - Ending Scene
The most definitive account of Helen's fate is in Homer's poem The Odyssey, which reveals that she returned to Sparta and reunited with Menelaus. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer leaves it ambiguous as to whether Helen went to Troy willingly or if she was abducted - but when she reappears in The Odyssey, she seems happy to have returned home with her husband. Homer's account of Helen's fate shows her to be an older and wiser Queen of Sparta, and that she had a peaceful reconciliation with Menelaus after her betrayal.
However, Helen's fate varies in other accounts in Greek mythology. While Homer definitively shows her returning to Sparta, the Euripides tragedy The Trojan Women depicts Helen as returning to Greece to face a death sentence. Troy shows Helen growing closer to Andromache and the other women in Troy, but The Trojan Women shows her as being shunned by them. Another variation of Helen's fate shows up in Euripides' Orestes, which claims that Helen was rescued by the god Apollo immediately after the fall of Troy, and was taken to Mount Olympus.
Troy is only loosely based on The Iliad, and restructures the events of the Trojan War to make the movie more entertaining and bombastic. Troy depicts Helen as a lovestruck young woman who came with Paris willingly and leaves her fate unknown, although implying that she stays with the Trojans after helping them escape the city. Although most Greek mythology shows Helen eventually returning to Greece one way or another, the Helen depicted in Troy seems to be embarking on a whole new adventure.
Source:screenrant.com
