![]() ![]() One night, an actual knight astride a warhorse tramples through his bedroom and off into a forest where Kevin’s wall used to be. His bedroom walls are covered with drawings of knights and fantastical figures, his toys ranging from Legos to cowboys to robots. If you want the formal rundown on Agamemnon's mythic history, Shmoop has the hookup, as always.Is it possible that Time Bandits, often hailed as a testament to the joys of childhood imagination, might be Terry Gilliam’s most pessimistic film? Let’s throw spoiler caution to the wind - the film is 34 years old, after all - and examine the facts: Kevin (Craig Warnock) is a boy who uses books and his imagination to escape the drudgery of his day-to-day life. ![]() The dwarves probably spared Kevin a messy death, and while Agamemnon is the perfect dad for him, his less-than-perfect-dad status is clearly going to come back to bite him. Now think about it: if she's cranky enough to kill him for sacrificing their child, how angry is she going to be when he shows up with a whole new kid? And then claims the kid is going to inherit the throne? In fact, in mythology, shortly after Agamemnon returns from Troy, she totally axes him to death in his bath-and that's likely where he's headed shortly after the dwarves take their leave. And don't think Clytemnestra didn't forget it. In order to get her off of his back, he had to sacrifice his daughter to her. Before setting out for Troy, Agamemnon earned himself a bucketful of wrath from the goddess Artemis. She doesn't like him, and if you know your Trojan War stories, the reasons become obvious. If you notice, this dude is not on the best of terms with his queen, Clytemnestra, who spends every scene she's in giving the man a serious skunk eye. But they went with Agamemnon.and there's a very specific reason why. He could have been Theseus or Perseus or any other Greek hero, and the arc of the story wouldn't have changed at all. Gilliam and his team didn't need to make this dude Agamemnon, after all. Agamemnon represents the great promise of Kevin's adventure: the chance to find someone who loves him, who gets where he's coming from, and who wants to spend as much time as possible with him.īut there's a darker side to it all, and we only see it from hints out of the corners in the film. That's a pretty awesome deal for a kid whose real father is more interested in the latest toaster than anything Kevin has to say. Furthermore, he shall from this day forward be my own son, and heir to the throne of Mycenae. Had the dwarves not snatched Kevin away again, he would have made Kevin his heir:ĪGAMEMNON: I have decreed that this boy shall remain here with us in our city. He's clearly quite keen to keep the boy, too. He's brave and kind and wise and strong, and he treats Kevin like an equal. On the surface, Agamemnon is everything you'd want a father figure to be. So, we need to do a little detective work to figure out who he is, though once we do, he gets very, very interesting. He appears to be fighting the Minotaur when we first see him-something that Theseus should be doing, not Agamemnon-while the Trojan War, where he actually appears in legend, is long over. Agamemnon's name is mentioned only once, and we have to infer a lot based on the stuff that's going on around him. ![]()
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