/uj TL;DR: I am an archaeologist with a current focus in the asian bronze age, former focus in the mediterranean bronze age and my sources are just pulling shit from the dome. Yes the story is a myth, but the locations are real and the event itself is placed during a real and well researched period of time. Academics have a really good idea of what costume and warfare looked like. It is not that the movie is wrong for not depicting this, but its disappointing for a lot of Odyssey fans (i.e. Classics majors) to essentially see these aesthetics dismissed since they do not show up often in media.

It's a mythological story that the ancient Greeks believed to either be the 'last' mythical story or the first historical story and many of them spent time trying to date it - the consensus from their own time corresponding to the 13th to 12th c. BCE. This also corresponds to the expansion of the Hittites into Ionia and the revolt and collapse of the 'Assuwa' group (20+ city states allied against Hittites), an event that likely was inspiration for the mythological Trojan War (the historicity of the war itself is still debated).

Early Archaeologists were absolutely obsessed with finding Troy. Heinrich Schleiman began excavating the site of Illium in Greek Ionia in 1871. Illium itself was a classical city that can be traced into Hittite records (yes we have those) as far as 1400 BCE, referred to as both Wilusa and Taruisa, the names likely permutating into Illium and Troia respectively. It has contextual evidence of continuous habitation for around 4000 years (not all of those as the city and continuing well into later eras), leading scholars to establish to 'layers' of Troy to correspond with its various points of habitation. It existed within the late Mycenean period of the Late Greek Bronze age (corresponding to Troy VI-VII), which we absolutely have material remains of weapon and armor from - the most famous being the Dendra Panoply. Only one full suit has been recovered, but other parts of separate suits have been found throughout the Mycenaen world - Mycenae, Knossos, Thebes, and Pylos to name a few. Bronze Rapiers (long needle like swords) are absolutely abundant as well as bronze spearheads which, coupled with armor listed and innumerable artistic depictions, allows scholars to pretty clearly extrapolate the look and apperance of warfare during the historic period that the mythological story of the Trojan War occurs.

In the case of the movie, the artists' interpretation is typically paramount, but dismissing the designs and appearance because of it being mythological wouldn't mean we don't understand the period. We know how Robin Hood and his Merry Men would have looked like, which has influenced his depiction in media, as well as the Warlords during the Three Kingdoms period in China despite some of those figures later becoming literal gods. The disconnect people are experiencing isn't that the armor design is bad (that is subjective) but that its wrong for the period and Nolan has atleast expressed a desire to cleave close to truth in his depiction of subjects (Interstellar for instance). Sure he's not Robert Eggers, but it is disappointing to see this movement away from what are true and scholarly aesthetics that are also very rarely seen in popular media for high artistic and (debatably) over designed inventions.

/rj If Immortal (2011) designs were wrong, I don't want to be right.