Aesthetic Choices: Spectacle versus Poetics Petersen’s Troy prioritizes tactile realism and kinetic spectacle. Costume and production design aim for a gritty historicism rather than the operatic mythic opulence of many earlier cinematic treatments of antiquity. Battle choreography emphasizes the visceral chaos of Bronze Age warfare—men in helmets and leather, tangled phalanxes, and the brutal intimacy of hand-to-hand combat. Cinematography and editing oscillate between sweeping panoramas and close-ups that frame characters’ interiority amid carnage.