/lit/ - Literature

Why is it that they are all universally missing the fundamental message of the poem? Every single one is built along the exact same lines

>Start with the judgment of Paris
>Big thing about the abduction of Helen
>Menelaus goes to his brother, Agammemnon gathers up all the chiefs, big Council of Elrondesque moment as they prepare to go
>Eventually land near Troy
>Big war scenes
>Achilles is awesome
>Hector is the champion of the trojans
>Achilles sulking in his tent, refusing to fight
>Trojans start winning
>Patrocles goes out to fight, gets killed
>Big climactic fight between the two champions, with Achilles winning
>Maybe a coda afterwards


It's basically power rangers, with the two big guys circling each other slowly until you have a climax in the fight itself. It's also a vision that nobody who actually read the Iliad would come to. The first fucking line of the poem is an invocation of the Muse to inspire a song about the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon. The entire war is just a backdrop to that personality struggle. And Homer goes out of his way to undercut the fight between Achilles and Hector at every opportunity; Hector can't beat Diomedes. He can't beat Ajax. The two of them are a LOT weaker than Achilles. Achilles defeats a minor god before fighting Hector, whose first reaction when he sees Achilles is to run for his life.

If we're reaching into pop culture for an analogue, the best one is probably the "contest" between Ozymandias and Dr Manhattan in Watchman, a fight between a skilled man and something akin to a god. Not to say it's not important, and in the Iliad, the reclamation of identity embodied in the original armor set Achilles wears is of extreme importance, (and of course the obvious avenging of the death of Patrocles), but the fight itself is not the climax, the stuff surrounding it might be. (You have a far stronger argument that the true climax is at the funeral games, but that's another post.)

Zero modern retellings of the Iliad that I am aware of do this. Why? Why is it always reduced so?