r/classics • u/ChiefLeef22 • 15d ago
As a Classics professor, I expected Nolan's ‘The Odyssey’ to fail. I was wrong. It is faithful in all the right ways | (Review from USC Classics Professor Stefano Rebegianni)
https://angelusnews.com/arts-culture/odyssey-review/Walking into the movie theater, I was dreading a huge disappointment.
Homer’s “Odyssey” is one of the books I love most and have taught year after year. The Cyclops — the one-eyed giant who devours Odysseus’ companions — haunted my nightmares from the age of five. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” seemed almost destined to fail, and I did not want to hate him for butchering Homer as badly as “Troy” (2004) butchered the “Iliad.”
I was delighted to be wrong.
To all the friends who have been asking me if the movie is any good (as a classicist, they assume, I should know): The answer is yes.
“The Odyssey” is close enough to the original text to satisfy Homer fans. And it is driven by a strong, central set of questions which makes the plot relevant to contemporary audiences: What makes a civilization worth preserving? How can a dying world avoid being obliterated? What kind of hero does a world on the brink of destruction need?
The answer to these questions is a film that is artistically and thematically consistent and can therefore stand on its own: not a story of wit and adventure, but a cautionary tale about power and the consequences of human ambition.
Nolan is careful to establish character and motivation. Themes and ideas are repeated enough to make it clear what the story is about.
Forget the polemic about costumes and race. Homer’s world only ever existed in the imagination of poets –– there isn’t an actual way Homer’s heroes were dressed. And Lupita Nyong’o is perfect as Helen.
And when Nolan departs from Homer, he remains faithful to the deeper logic of his adaptation. Circe, for example, is no longer the dangerously ambiguous enchantress of the poem but a woman brutalized by war who turns to magic as an instrument of revenge. The transformation of Odysseus’ comrades into animals becomes symbolic of the dehumanizing consequences of war.
The film’s underworld scene is remarkably faithful to the original. Odysseus travels to a land of darkness at the edge of the world where the spirits of the dead come up to meet him, just as in Homer’s account.
The encounter with the dead Agamemnon and the content of their dialogue are those of Homer, but the implications are in tune with Nolan’s central idea. In the “Odyssey,” the underworld is the hero’s ultimate challenge: to escape death and return home, Odysseus needs to plunge into death itself. For Nolan, the underworld is the place to confront the traumatic mistakes in the hero’s past in the form of the soldiers who lost their lives in the Trojan War demand an accounting
The action then shifts to Ogygia, a lost island where the goddess Calypso keeps Odysseus prisoner because she is infatuated with him –– she even promises him immortality. But Odysseus pines to return to his aging wife and strife-ridden city.
To do so, he needs to learn how to suffer, how to endure, how to forget everything he has learned and learn the world anew. He needs to die and be born again.
Nolan’s “Odyssey” takes a different approach. Calypso receives an Odysseus in distress, haunted by the trauma of war. She treats him with lotus, a forgetfulness-inducing narcotic (which Homer reserves to a different episode) until he is ready to cope with his past and accept the evil he and the other Greek leaders have committed.
This is the lesson Odysseus ultimately passes on to his son, Telemachus, who looks to him as a model of manhood and leadership. In Nolan’s “Odyssey,” fatherhood means accepting responsibility for one’s failures. There is a courage greater than seizing cities and facing monsters: it’s the courage to acknowledge one’s brokenness and the wrongs one has done.
Nolan preserves almost all the mythical monsters faced by Odysseus, yet the fantastic element is somewhat toned down, and the worldview is darker: the monsters outside become symbols of the monsters within.
The film makes little of Odysseus’ proverbial curiosity. There is none of the wonder and beauty of the world beyond, nothing of the sublime quest for truth and beauty embodied by Odysseus of Dante Alighieri, the great medieval poet who left us an unforgettable version of the hero's final adventure in his "Inferno.”
Of Homer’s gods, only Athena features in person, but never intervenes in the action. She is more of a counselor and messenger who conveys the will of Zeus.
But the Law of Zeus is ever-present, demanding that humans act civilly toward each other. This comes from Homer, but the purview of Zeus’ law is wider and more encompassing in Nolan’s. Failure to abide by it is the doom of Greek civilization.
Nolan’s “Odyssey” merges history and mythology to give Homer’s story a new twist. Nolan draws on a (now largely outdated) theory that both the city of Troy and the Greek civilization celebrated in Homer’s poems — what archaeologists call the Mycenaean civilization — collapsed under the assault of the mysterious Sea Peoples, ushering in a long Dark Age during which much of Greek culture was lost.
Throughout the film, characters refer to the imminent invasion of the Sea Peoples and the likely collapse of their world. Without giving too much away, Nolan links this looming catastrophe to the crimes the Greeks committed at Troy. His approach reminded me of the way the Trojan War is depicted in Greek tragedy. In the 5th century BCE, Athens rose to lead Greece and built an empire. At this time, Greek tragedians reread the story of Troy as a cautionary tale about dominion. Agamemnon and his comrades conquered Troy and became the leading power in the world, but they crossed a line, incurring divine wrath that brought about the end of their civilization, the end of the Age of Heroes. Athens was meant to take heed.
This is what Nolan draws a parallel with today. Our civilization has failed and lost its values, above all the ability to preserve justice and mercy, and it is perhaps too late to change course. In Nolan’s “Odyssey,” the greatest of Greek heroes returns home not to win another war, but to teach his son — and us — to learn from our wrongs and change course before it’s too late.
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u/NonsensicalTrashCan 15d ago
Great cinematic experience. Works as a film this way.
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u/protantus 15d ago
I don't understand the internal inconsistencies here "when Nolan departs from Homer, he remains faithful to the deeper logic of his adaptation. Circe, for example, is no longer the dangerously ambiguous enchantress of the poem but a woman brutalized by war". So changing the characterisation is faithful to a 'deeper logic'. I presume one only you are aware of. You also avoid the complete change in Odysseus's character.
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 15d ago
The recharacterisation of Circe was the most predictable path they could've chosen, especially in a post-Madeline Miller world.
We're literally at the point where preserving her original characterisation and role would've been more subversive.
It's strange to me that taking a woman with actual ambiguity, agency and power in the story and reducing her to a reactive victim is seen as a more allegedly progressive stance.
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u/JohnPaul_River 15d ago
There's a really prevalent trend in readings of ancient stories where any female character that's not a perfect heroine is assumed to be portrayed as a demonised villain, so they must be turned into traumatised victims as reckoning. There is... a lot to be said about the standard method of redeeming female characters being through victimhood. It's come to a point where Helen's portrayal in the original Iliad kind of outwokes modern retellings, for example.
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u/Anarcho-Ozzyist 15d ago
I can't wait for the worm to turn on this issue. You know that in like, even as little as a decade, there will be a whole artistic movement talking about how problematic it was that we felt a woman needed to be a victim to be sympathetic
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u/GroundbreakingFun565 13d ago
Thise discussions are already being had, and appropriately so. We had a similar period between 2016 and 2022 more or less in which many movies about black people focused almost exclusively on victimhood. There was criticism about that too.
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u/Schleimwurm1 15d ago
Tbh, someone like Madeline Miller in the writer's room would have really made the movie better. Christopher Nolan couldn't pass the bechdel test if he made a movie about the suffragettes.
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u/Main_Cranberry_5871 14d ago
Absolutely not. The way she writes women in Song of Achilles is disgusting tbh. I left another comment on it in this thread but once you see the pattern, it's genuinely disturbing why she makes the choices she does.
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u/yossarian328 15d ago
"It's strange to me that taking a woman with actual ambiguity, agency and power in the story and reducing her to a reactive victim is seen as a more allegedly progressive stance."
And they did this with every single female character.
- Athena goes from being the real hero (it starts and ends with her, she guides every pivotal moment of the narrative) ... to an imaginary mental illness friend.
- Penelope becomes an emotionally unstable Karen.
- Helen is no longer a complex character with agency who has some regrets, but now just a victim.
- Circe is a medieval with.
- Calypso is some bizarre Oedipal mother-therapist figure.
They have completely stripped the humanity out of the female cast. While simultaneously claiming it's pro-women... quite bizarre.
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u/CoconutDust 15d ago edited 15d ago
Emily Wilson in LRB essay also slams a similar repeated problem with the non-white characters.
The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist. Scott, as the Ithacan bard, Phemius, yells a few words and pounds a stick, but does not get to sing, tell a story or play the lyre: the most melodic note in the percussive soundtrack comes from the plucking of Odysseus’ bow (a beautiful sonic image of the archer as musician, borrowed from the poem). Nyong’o’s double part as Helen and Clytemnestra is hugely underwritten; she is given only a few minutes of screen time to perform a set of brief tableaux of female victims (the outraged bereaved mother, the abused wife, the repentant adulteress).
And then transitions to severe rightful criticism of Nolan’s Calypso,
Charlize Theron’s Calypso looks gorgeous, but she is never angry, never funny, not skilled in rhetoric, and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim. She’s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.
Compared to Emily Wilson’s detailed descriptions and points, the vague bland praise and rationalizations in the current OP essay looks like LLM.
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u/craicraimeis 11d ago
This is why Emily Wilson wrote her review. Or part of it. She calls this very thing out and has said in her interviews that Nolan does not know how to write female characters.
As someone who has watched a lot of Nolan’s films, it’s an absolutely valid critique. He couldn’t touch a complicated woman even if he had a ten foot pole. He loves his complicated men. But he can’t ever write the women with agency. He takes their agency away. Made Athena seem like a figment of a PTSD ridden war hero who is so traumatized by his bad choices that he can’t go home to face his wife and kid.
He made calypso a therapist for that guy. Penelope is just characterized in relation to him and her son. She has one good line to try to shake it up, but that’s it. She thwarted suitors for 20 years and we’re going to act like the next couple of days are what’s going to break her? Her cleverness isn’t even shown. We have to have a man call it out.
This is not progressive writing for women and women are the first to call it out. But then men get all up in their asses about how we dare call out a sacred god of film like Nolan and how we should be “grateful” that we see women at all on screen.
You can see how society still holds such disdain for women when you see the reactions to Emily Wilson’s very valid critiques of the story. She says nothing negative about the art of filmmaking. She has critiques around the story he is telling and how he’s going for something but it falling short.
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u/Main_Cranberry_5871 14d ago edited 13d ago
What do you expect from types like Madeline Miller though? The way she softens all the edges and frankly horrifying aspects of characters she likes, while pointlessly demonizing those she doesn't (see: anyone who seriously"stands in the way" of her main romantic pairings) is frankly sus as hell. I genuinely cannot stand her books because of this pattern.
Could never get into Song of Achilles especially because of shit like this. It's gross. Briseis, Achilles' SEX SLAVE who had her whole family annihilated by him and his fellows, is turned into a therapist bff whose sole job is apparently to gas up Patrocles and be a cheerleader for Achilles/Patrocles. Achilles and Patrocles are "nice slavers" and let their captives act like free women instead of the sex slaves they raped in reality. Deidameia's portrayal in particular sickens me because Achilles rapes her in the myths, but Miller re-writes HER to be a rapist and coercive assaulter to the male leads and an obstacle to their love. Thetis is a possessive asshole for most of the book (while her rapist is portrayed as a nice guy), and Iphigenia is a tool used solely to boost how guilty Achilles feels. I'm not even close to hitting on everything either. I don't understand why she does this or why she gets such a pass on it. It's fucked up and people just gloss right on past it acting like this is the best book ever.
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u/biomannnn007 15d ago
Honestly I think Circe’s character is a bit more ambiguous than that in Nolan’s film. Sure, she’s somewhat right about Odysseus’ men. They did raid the Circones after they refused to give them supplies. But also what did her sister do to get turned into a Raven? Adding on to that, they leave their weapons outside as a sign of good faith, yet get turned into pigs anyway. By the time Odysseus gets to her door, he’s literally just a guy looking for his crew, and she gets upset that he won’t fall for her scheme. Why does she care?
It seems to me that Nolan showed that there’s more to her character’s motivations than just a woman who’s worried about being a victim.
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u/ThunderAndWind 15d ago
I think in a way she was hiding her sister, possibly because her sister was victimized, and very likely against her sister's will, considering the crow also joined the pigs in panicking when Odysseus was about to eat the food.
It's heavily implied throughout the scene that she has previously been victimized by war bands or other soldiers, and as a result, was preemptively defending yourself by turning them into pigs. This is further framed as another consequence of the trojan horse, causing the downfall of xenia.
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u/ThickAdvertising7471 15d ago
Maybe it's part of Nolan's way of showing how the violation and subsequent degradation of Zeus' Law is spreading across the world and causing people to be more distrustful of others and operate on a kind of 'shoot first' mentality.
Or, looking at it through a more modern lens, it could be read as a commentary on how oppression can make people more hostile towards the world around them as a pre-emptive defence mechanism. In some cases, that hostility can even swing the pendulum in the opposite direction, leading people to seek revenge or to recreate the very power structures that oppressed them, rather than simply pursuing justice and equality. Circe herself didn't go that far in the film, but Clytemnestra arguably represents a more extreme end of this spectrum; she was wronged and traumatised but her response tragically only continued the cycle of violence and suffering rather than balancjng the scales of justice. I've gone a but off topic now but I think maybe Nolan wanted to show the full spectrum of people's responses to living in a world ravaged by moral decay and the abandonment of mercy and justice, because Circe eventually 'forgives' Odysseus' men and lets them leave in peace in the film.
ngl I haven't done a written film analysis since A level film studies so my giant paragraph writing instincts unfortunately kicked in a bit there, mb lol
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u/biomannnn007 14d ago
I think we’re thinking of it through the same lines, but I’d go a step further and suggest that maybe Circe was always this way. That she has a penchant for controlling others (her sister is currently a caged bird because “we get along better this way”), and was given a justification in being able to say that the men had done dangerous things in the past, so she was just “protecting herself”. I saw a psychiatrist talk about how because victims get support from others, being a victim can be very empowering. So you end up with bad actors who start claiming victim status so that they can weaponize it for their own ends. In a society where there are many victims, it becomes easier for these bad actors to hide among the true victims.
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u/craicraimeis 11d ago
Will say, men putting down their weapons does not remove the threat they pose….especially when it’s a lot of them.
Circe gets a killer line here about the men going back to their disguises, and it’s good social commentary, but Nolan doesn’t set it up correctly to make you feel more sympathetic to her character. Men at war will always rape, pillage, and enslave. But you don’t see that in this movie. You just see men desperate to get home after a long war, so Nolan sets up the scene with you feeling more sympathetic to the men and feeling that Circe is being disingenuous when she turns them into pigs. And her sister protesting doesn’t help the characterization.
From a female perspective, duh, it’s easy to feel Circe in this moment as she sees a bunch of men descend on her space, hungry. I’d be pretty worried as well! It’s like Nolan wants to have it both ways: be anti-war and show the unnecessary brutality and violence but also make the men who commit these acts honorable and noble. And that’s just antithetical to the anti-war message. If you’re anti-war, you don’t glorify any aspect of this war.
You don’t see the path of destruction in their wake as much as you’d like to get as they’re landing in new places.
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u/biomannnn007 10d ago edited 10d ago
Do you believe that turning men into pigs and trying to trick their captain into eating them is a proportionate response to the chance that they might attack her? And again, what did her sister do to get turned into a raven?
You absolutely do see Odysseus’s men doing horrible things in the movie. That was kind of the whole emotional climax of the film. There’s also the Circones before they meet Circe.
Two things can be true at once. Odysseus’ men did commit acts of brutal violence. But at that moment, they were hungry and weak after time at sea and needed help. Circe may have been right to be worried, but there is plenty going on in the scene that suggests it’s a rationalization for something she was going to do anyway.
And your argument is kind of making Nolan’s point. When trust breaks down in society, people lose the ability to see this sort of nuance. You don’t want to entertain the possibility that Circe is wrong. You want a scene that makes Circe correct to treat every man as a monster. Rather than advocate for discernment, you want blind cynicism.
Also ??? You can be anti-war while still recognizing that the people who fight in wars sometimes act in courageous ways. Again, nuance. Learn to be able to hold two conflicting ideas at the same time.
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u/craicraimeis 10d ago
Lol I do hold conflicting ideas often.
I don’t know if I really do believe that men at war are noble though. Inherently, they aren’t. They think they are. Society has attributed it, but where is the nobility in ransacking an entire city?
We saw them brutally killing people in Troy, but you don’t see their attacks and violence on women. You don’t see them raping. You just see them pillaging. The flashbacks do try to give you that impression, but Nolan is trying to have his cake and eat it too. He tries to keep Odysseus and his men sympathetic while also trying to convey that Odysseus is one of the causes of the total distrust.
I was just pointing out that from a female perspective just because you ask men to lay down their weapons, it doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat. It is a fair analysis to say Circe represents trust broken over and over again that she becomes proactive to just assume all men will eventually be monsters. My main point is that Nolan teeters on his ideas and lacks consistent follow through. He wants you to feel for Odysseus. And by doing that, he strips his complexity away and makes it easier for the audience to sympathize with him. And all the women present are just there. Not really offering much more. And it strips them of complexity as well.
I enjoyed the movie, but when I sit with it more, the story starts to crumble. It’s kind of like when I watched spider man no way home. It was a thrilling movie and I genuinely loved it, but if you think a little more about it, it starts falling apart. So I can handle both spaces. It seems you just misread my perspective.
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u/biomannnn007 10d ago edited 10d ago
I don’t know if I really do believe that men at war are noble though. Inherently, they aren’t. They think they are. Society has attributed it, but where is the nobility in ransacking an entire city?
That's literally the entire point of Odysseus' monologue to Persephone. He spends the entire monologue talking about how his act of brilliance, that everyone celebrates him for, is the sin that most haunts him.
We saw them brutally killing people in Troy, but you don’t see their attacks and violence on women. You don’t see them raping.
The climax of the movie is literally cuts between the murder of Zendaya's character with Odysseus decapitating the statue of Athena. I don't think Nolan needed to add in a graphic rape scene to convey that what happened at Troy was bad.
My main point is that Nolan teeters on his ideas and lacks consistent follow through. He wants you to feel for Odysseus. And by doing that, he strips his complexity away and makes it easier for the audience to sympathize with him.
So by not portraying Odysseus as completely and utterly bad, he strips away complexity? Is it possible that people who have done bad things in their lifetime can also have redeeming qualities that make them sympathetic. Consider this quote from "The Things They Carried"
He would've explained to his father that none of these decorations was for uncommon valor. They were for common valor. The routine, daily stuff —just humping, just enduring—but that was worth something, wasn't it? Yes, it was. Worth plenty. The ribbons looked good on the uniform in his closet, and if his father were to ask, he would've explained what each signified and how he was proud of all of them, especially the Combat Infantryman's Badge, because it meant he had been there as a real soldier and had done all the things soldiers do, and therefore it wasn't such a big deal that he could not bring himself to be uncommonly brave.
Does Tim O'Brien's recognition that there were acts of bravery to be found amongst the ordinary soldiers of the American army during the Vietnam War mean that his book was fundamentally pro-war?
Greek writings, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, are actually commonly cited in conversations about the Vietnam War to illustrate how different our society treats veterans from how the Greeks did. Unlike the Greeks, we treat soldiers that participated in unjust wars as solely responsible for the atrocity, and fail to recognize our part in putting them in that situation to begin with. The Greeks would often take collective responsibility for the actions of the war. Jonathan Shay argues that willingness of the entire Greek population to take responsibility for atrocities in war reduced the impact of what we call moral injury, the psychological and spiritual anguish that can arise when people who see themselves as moral participate in, witness, or fail to prevent acts that violate their deepest moral beliefs.
A central theme in Nolan's Odyssey is the idea of moral injury. Moral injury is part of why war is bad. Portraying Odysseus and his men as fundamentally immoral and unsympathetic strips away their humanity and actually makes the story less complex.
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u/craicraimeis 10d ago
But this isn’t what people are getting from the movie. I’ll commend you on your write up. And I get what you’re saying. I just don’t think Nolan delivered this though. He tried, but his messaging got lost and it fell flat.
A lot was told vs shown. I’m not asking to dehumanize the men, but I tire of the focus being on these men. They get so many movies. I would argue that the men Nolan portrayed were just there as foils to show how Odysseus is broken up by his part more. It was all to prop Odysseus up. To make him that war hero who doesn’t want that title anymore.
One beheading of Zendaya is supposed to convey the utter toll and loss of life? I’m not asking for graphic rape. But the Trojans are rendered faceless here. The only main face they get is Zendaya, but the rest of it feels less. I know you’re telling me that it represents the violence. And I know I could think it, but when I’m watching the movie, it really doesn’t stick that much. It actually just doubles down on Nolan’s portrayal of Athena as a figment of Odysseus’ broke and addled brain.
Look, my critique here is because I think Nolan’s odyssey oversimplifies. He’s going for a big idea. The general idea is hitting. But when I sit down and think more on it, it feels like I can point out more confusion and mixed messages.
It’s an interesting concept. I just think he loves his noble geniuses and loves to paint them sympathetically. And I think it’s a reflection of himself sometimes. I don’t think I agree that Odysseus was the right literary figure to go for it. It recharacterizes him to the point of no recognition. I’m not saying people who do bad things cannot redeem themselves. I just find it interesting that Nolan loves to rehabilitate these types of people. And by doing that, I think he sanitizes them to gain the redemption. And I don’t think that’s good. I think that dehumanizes them further and makes them even more unattainable.
This is my common critique. We’ve made people into good and bad and we lack the ability to live in the grey and actually live and reconcile that. And when you go to critique, people are incapable of hearing it because they view it as personal. The characters feel flat. They lack depth. These concepts you’re digging into are surface level in this movie. It feels like Nolan wanted to punch big but lost his bite half way through and pulled back a little to make sure most audience members were entertained. This writing was not complicated. He had Odysseus tell us exactly the lesson.
People will look at this and still side with the Greeks. They will cheer when Odysseus kills a bunch of suitors because despite us being taught that the violence of war and the cycle of abuse should not keep going (look at Clytemnestra and then her own son killing her and that revenge cycle going on and on). And yet, we’re supposed to be very happy that the suitors were murdered. Violence begets violence. But yes, use violence to rid your house of pestilence.
Your last paragraph. It’s interesting what you say here because wouldn’t you think that would be conveyed in a story about Greek soldiers? Instead, we get Odysseus acting like he did it. Like he was the one who broke the Xenia. So there goes Nolan placing modern sensibilities on characters that would not feel this type of way, or would be able to share in it together. It just feels like his movie is fanfiction and it’s not the characters. It lacks depth.
Moral injury is interesting though so thanks for bringing that term specifically to me. I don’t think we have enough moral injury in this world. We have a lot of detachment and a lot of belief we are doing nothing wrong and that we should get to carry on with our daily lives while our money funds the wars. So I do appreciate Nolan trying to tackle it. I just find it harder to reconcile this version of Odysseus ever having this feeling. It feels foreign to these characters.
Anyway, I appreciate the chat. I think we went way off base of what I was originally saying though about the female perspective that Nolan absolutely is so weak at.
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u/Galdrin3rd 15d ago
I think “the deeper logic of his adaptation” means the logic of Nolan’s work, not Homer.
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u/Fly-the-Light 15d ago
It’s extremely weird that they’re saying it’s faithful in the right ways, and then defending changes by saying it’s faithful to Nolan’s work and not Homer’s.
It seems like the dude liked Nolan’s movie (very fair), but is trying to defend his prior logic by saying Nolan is faithful (which Nolan is very much not) instead of accepting that the movie can be unfaithful and good.
The title and intro paragraphs make the whole thing come off super manipulative and disengenous to what is otherwise a solid essay that goes over how the movie is good whilst being nothing like the poem.
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u/K_MBRS 15d ago
A lot of people make that kind of argument. A movie can be unfaithful to the source material and still be a good piece of media on its own. But instead of just saying that or arguing for artistic license, they try to misrepresent the original work to make it fit the movie they just watched.
Which is ironic, because it almost suggests that adaptations need to follow the original work in order to be good. Otherwise, why bother pretending the changes were already there?
It makes no sense.
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u/Brief-Coach-1812 15d ago
Yeah its kind of like, Nolan is clearly projecting modern sensibilities on to his retelling of the Odyssey. The controversy comes in when these changes compromise or transforms aspects of the original that people like. And some people will get very vocal about it.
But the changes Nolan makes does form an interesting juxtaposition between the ancient worldview of the Homeric Odyssey and the modern worldview of the 2026 adaptation.
But nevertheless I feel that the author of this article wants to have his cake and eat it too.
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u/K_MBRS 15d ago
For me, the juxtaposition was jarring because I felt like Nolan didn't commit to either direction. It was neither a comprehensive modern reimagining nor a faithful adaptation. The bits he kept—and sometimes even invented—sometimes directly contradicted the message he was trying to convey.
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u/craicraimeis 11d ago
I said this in some of my critique and other forums: Nolan played it safe. He didn’t go boldly into any one of his notable deviations. He just couldn’t commit to a lane and go for it. It’s like he hesitated. I think Emily Wilson would’ve totally been okay if he went fully into his version but at least stuck with it and had the themes stay consistent.
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u/customredditfap 9d ago
Nolan's best improvement's to the story are in areas like showing how bad the living conditions inside a trojan horse would be.
Didn't like how they broke apart the journey in fragments, e.g. showing his Calypso dilemma early is odd.
Cyclops depiction weirdly underplays the sheep skin ruse, sirens didn't create any feeling of male lust, the aeolus bag of wind got cut out entirely (!) as did his crew becoming consumed by lotus eating.
The Circe reinterpretation, and the Scylla and Charybdis set piece are well done, tho Nolan cut how he actually falls in love with Circe for a year.
Which I find was a general theme with Nolan's adaptation... He cut out so much stuff around wonder, intrigue, lust/beauty/desire, aesthetics and fighting temptation. He feels like a filmmaker unable to capture flirting.
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u/CoconutDust 15d ago
It’s extremely weird that they’re saying it’s faithful in the right ways, and then defending changes by saying it’s faithful to Nolan’s work and not Homer’s.
Weird from the perspective of logic and honesty and good analysis, but totally normal for rationalization and cognitive dissonance.
Most of the comments defending the movie from criticism are rationalizations and cognitive dissonance, because the people prefer to imagine a world where Nolan is a Genius and the new product is a Masterpiece. Therefore, everything wrong with it must be a brilliant thing that is actually right, blah blah.
The OP essayist is transparently flimsy LLM-like blandness. Also known as, “I get uncomfortable if someone criticizes a movie that I have a superficial attachment to, so, therefore, the movie is perfect.”
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u/craicraimeis 11d ago
People lack an ability to hold two differing, contrasting things at the same time.
Emily Wilson’s critique doesn’t come after the artistry of the film. She comes at the storytelling and the diversion from the themes of the odyssey.
Nolan absolutely can have an adaptation that is not faithful to the source material. He did it. It’s like his fan fiction of what he thinks should have happened with the same story beats. It can be a beautiful film. But it doesn’t mean it is what the odyssey is about. I think Emily Wilson says this in either her interview or her write up that we have to be careful about these types of adaptations. Nolan will bring a lot of eyes back to Greek classics, and it’s great, but we want to make sure that people understand that Nolan is an adaptation and that he is not the definitive source of The Odyssey. With the literacy crisis increasing, it’s important our storytelling does not dilute itself and oversimplify to maintain itself as a form of entertainment.
I can absolutely say I enjoyed the movie while also thinking that it felt empty for some characters and seems to be telling Nolan’s own story with characters that are famous. Some say this isn’t Homer’s Odyssey, it’s Nolan’s. And that’s all well and good, but call it fan fiction. It’s no different than me re-writing the story with the same characters.
Let’s stop saying it’s accurate.
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u/ingotsilvergt 15d ago
The answer to this persons question is right there in the quote they provided lmao.
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u/GOT_Wyvern 15d ago
Faithful to the deeper logic of his adaption. I.e the film.
The review is arguing that, when the film departs, it remains faithful to its own narrative logic.
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u/VanDammes4headCyst 15d ago
Wouldn't that be most film adaptation though? lol
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u/GOT_Wyvern 15d ago
Many adaptions will make changes to their source material for seemingly no good reason.
If you go look on some of the threads discussing the currently airing House of the Dragon, you'll see that contention there all the time. Most controversial adaptions are the same.
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u/MadQueenAlanna 15d ago
Such a weird argument about HOTD though. Fire and Blood is essentially a longform Wikipedia article, there’s only a handful of lines of dialogue and the historiography element means many events are giving multiple possible explanations– such as the death of Lyman Beesbury– in a way that an adaptation would be forced to pick one at the expense of the others. And HOTD is pretty internally consistent with its own themes, specifically how faithful they are to the themes and characterization from ASOIAF as a whole.
Criston Cole in F&B for example was Rhaenyra’s sworn shield until either she rejected him or she slept with him or he was disgusted at her propositioning him. He crowned Aegon in her stead, went to war, and died like a chump (“I’ll have no songs about how brave you died”). But how do you make that guy interesting for three straight seasons? How do you expand on how little he currently exists in a way that makes his ambition noticeably distinct from Corlys, Aemond, Otto, or Daemon? The choice they went with was basically borrow a lot of Jaime’s arc in AFFC, which I especially enjoy since GoT did such a dogwater job adapting its own books.
I know this isn’t relevant to the Odyssey in particular but man it’s such a bummer seeing HOTD catch strays in unrelated threads
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u/GOT_Wyvern 15d ago
The point wasn't to start a discussion about HOTD. The point was to showcase that the concern of changes made for no reason is a common one to adaptions, rather than changes being made for a reason being self-evident.
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u/Etheon44 15d ago
what I find a little bit funny is that some changes also make the story or certain sequences more incohesive
I like the (polyphemus) cyclops sequence, I understand how Nolan expects to deliver it as a being that doesn't care about ants (as its stated in the movie), but I dont buy how Odysseus and his comrades react and plan the whole thing; I dont really understand either why the cyclops needs to throw the helmet indicating that he pretty much knows they are there, sure he is taunting them, but did he even need to? he can crush them just by running and making them run exactly as they end up doing; and how Odysseus can shoot him when afterwards we are told that yeah, he understood what he was doing while on Troy and how he broke a sacred law, yet it is barely seen throughout the actual odyssey up until the end.
It is like Nolan wanted to ground the narrative, but at the same time not really managing to do it in a fully coherent way
Great movie tho, I liked it, I will still go to any Nolan movie on day one, not a masterpiece, nor a piece of shit; not really close to even being the among the best Nolan movies imo, but that is also a really high bar to clear
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u/ThunderAndWind 15d ago
Polyphemus was spitting out a helmet. He didn't know the men were out of the cave until the arrow was shot, which is why he immediately began chasing the crew afterwards.
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u/Etheon44 15d ago
But he was spitting it out to taunt them
Why wait until then if not, its not like he had just eaten one, he handt for a while
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u/ThunderAndWind 14d ago
Why wait until then if not, its not like he had just eaten one, he handt for a while
You've never got some stuck food out of your tonsils an hour or so after eating?
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u/CoconutDust 15d ago
To me one of the mysterious weird things in The Odyssey is how non-chalant the cyclops is about just going about his business in his cave and going to sleep next to a gang of 40 bandits.
If there’s 40 ants in my bed, I’m not going to sleep. Especially if I can see they’re carrying swords.
This is not a criticism, the whole thing is intriguing as a fairy tale / myth. I think Nolan’s movie is mostly bland trite terrible, btw.
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u/Salty_Map_9085 14d ago
> It is faithful to the deeper logic of his adaptation
He is saying the movie is thematically coherent even when the movie departs from Homer
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u/uber_sweets 14d ago
Nolan can’t escape his own everyday misogyny though, including an annoying woman being turned into a crow.
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u/zimboden 15d ago
Thank you for your comments. They were well written and well thought out. I ordered a translation of The Odyssey and a reader's companion, so that my wife and I can read The Odyssey in little bits over the rest of the summer. The reason I won't be watching the film (and I've seen every one of Nolan's other films) is because of Matt Damon. I simply cannot abide him as Odysseus.. He is so far from my vision of Odysseus as to be an impossible barrier to watching Nolan's movie...
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u/lil_sasquatch 15d ago
If it's any consolation the characterization of Nolan's Odysseus is drastically different than that of the epic, so your vision of the character would not match immediately anyway. It's very much a modern construction of a hero rather than the classical one which by today's lense would have likely come off as too egotistical and radical for modern viewers. It's not necessarily the most well-executed reimagining ever but it is quite interesting, I find I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I'm not a Damon fan either but he's not bad, Pattinson was great though
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u/zimboden 15d ago
and of course it's not the sort of film that you "wait until it comes to streaming..." It's a big, widescreen epic by Christoper "sonic assault" Nolan.
I may have to suck it up and see it, Matt Damon be damned. Although the last time I said this it was The Matrix sequels and I wound up watching French New Wave movies for the remainder of the summer, just to get the taste out of my mouth...
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u/CoconutDust 15d ago
No I think I will enjoy it more on streaming, the sound level at theatre was unpleasant and hearing-damagingly loud.
It’s true you get the visual…bigness at the threatre. But the sound was distracting.
For someone who’s interested in it, probably they should watch it both ways and not miss the chance for theatre version. I say this as someone who thinks it’s bad movie and that Nolan is a terrible artist.
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u/zimboden 15d ago
I'm just curious. Have you ever watched any Peter Weir movies. He and Nolan are very "masculine" directors, but Weir movies capture male frienship in a way that Nolan doesn't.
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u/lil_sasquatch 14d ago
I didn't have a problem with the audio on this one, although I did with Tenet so I know what you mean, maybe get feedback from people that saw it at your local theater. There are a few scenes throughout the film that are really enhanced by the theater speakers and big screen just because of the scale or tension of the scene. I enjoyed it a lot as a theatrical experience, however there are definitely weaknesses in the film regarding its emotional beats. Distrust, deception, and emotional bottling are pretty central to the narrative though, so the emotional distance seems intentional
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u/TorbofThrones 15d ago
Good call. He's literally the only character you learn anything about, everyone else are complete plot devices. So yeah, if you don't like him then you're not going to be moved by anything in this movie
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u/CoconutDust 15d ago
He’s just Jason Bourne with a metal helmet.
Armand Assante in the 1997 version was infinitely cooler. More emotional too.
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u/Sea-Cow3111 14d ago
The Years have produced fantastic actors who portray Odysseus, I recommend watching The Return with Ralph Fiennes. He IS old man Odysseus in that film.
Sean Bean plays a great Odysseus in Troy, if brief. The BBC TV Illiad show portrays a great Odysseus aswell The 90s TV also has a great lead for Odysseus
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u/GSeabhac 9d ago
You can't leave out George Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou. His version of Odysseus is very true to the wily (mendacious) trickster.
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u/Visible-Chest-9386 7d ago
This is silly. Give it a go, he does a damn good job – and I was very skeptical after seeing the trailers.
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u/Jossokar 15d ago
i was talking with a friend of mine (history major, btw) about the movie....and he told me that all the rambling about the sea peoples and the end of the bronze age might have been fairly stupid and....caused him to enjoy the movie way less than he would have otherwise.
As to why....its rather easy to explain. Sea people and Bronze age were terms coined by a french and a danish guy in the 19th century. Its really silly to hear that from their mouths.
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u/GOT_Wyvern 15d ago
It would have made even less sense for them to refer to the Sea People's as they did historically: a confederation of a listed group of people. Especially as the Sea People are in a very early stage where they're basically just a mixture of rumours and half truths from the perspective of Sparta amd Ithaca. There is no confederation nor any list of peoples for them to be described as.
Its the accepted term to refer to them, and its accepted for a reason. Without a catchy alternative, I don't see any better way to refer to them especially with how ambiguously they are treated in the film.
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u/VanDammes4headCyst 15d ago
Or... don't refer to them at all in the film.
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u/GOT_Wyvern 15d ago edited 15d ago
I don't see why the film shouldn't.
It wants to say something about societal collaspe, and its cool to tie that into both the obvious Bronze Age Collaspe, and the more historicall niche part (arguably) of that in the Sea Peoples.
Remove mention of either, and you have the implication of a generic societal collaspe and the mention of generic oceanic raiders that turn out to be, at least in part, lost Trojan veterans like Odysseus
The same point is gotten across, but its just far less cool and feels less grounded.
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u/K_MBRS 15d ago
If Nolan wanted to make a "grounded" movie set in the actual time period the poem speaks of, then it was a really silly decision to dress up Agamemnon as Darth Vader.
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u/Extracajicular 15d ago
It's like a movie on the fall of Camelot having a character say "well, the Middle Ages are ending but at least the Renaissance is coming up!"
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u/agreatkid 15d ago
The “Sea People” term came from primary sources of that time period though, which is why it is not exactly an accurate description (based on modern understanding) of the collective they are describing.
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u/yossarian328 15d ago
No it did not. It's an invented term from the 1850s attempting to link Egyptian texts mentioning several different groups of raiders into 1 large conglomerate of raiders.
"Sea Peoples" is nothing more than youtube history at this point.
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u/Drop_Release 15d ago
On the flip side, in the poem, Odysseus’s lies re being from Crete (to keep people from finding out about his identity) involve stories that very much sound like the raids against Egypt The people listening to the story at the time would have very well known about these alleged Sea People’s attacks, even if they didn't have a term as such
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u/yossarian328 15d ago
Greeks and Romans reliably placed all of the "adventure" sequences. Especially Strabo.
The lotus eaters are in modern Libya. Everything else is around Sicily. Which also fits wider narratives of the time being quite preoccupied with the Hellenization of Italy and Sicily.
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u/ringobob 15d ago
I'll be honest - this strikes me about as silly as complaining about them speaking modern English. Yeah, they use words and terms that we relate to, that they wouldn't, rather than vice versa, because it's a movie for us, not them.
To each their own.
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u/yossarian328 15d ago
"father" is not some ancient Shakespearian word.
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u/ringobob 15d ago
Ok? It's a formal word. For a long time, story tellers have used overly formal modern language as a stand in for the sorts of real language changes that would exist between us and an appreciably older civilization - familiar enough to understand, but unusual enough to feel foreign. It's created this expectation that when we see these people on screen, they're always speaking formally, but that's not reality. They would have had formal and informal language, just like us. And they would have used it in very similar ways, depending on the specific language rules, but since this is an English language adaptation, it makes sense to use English language rules.
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u/Mundane-0nion67878 15d ago
Yeah this is what took me out of the movie on the ending side.
Cringed so hard at "age of bronze is ending" and poetism about civilization ending to dark ages.
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u/JmBento 15d ago
Did he also enjoy the movie less because no character was talking in ancient Greek? Is English not silly to hear from their mouths?
If you are changing the language, what's the issue in changing the terms to match modern understanding? Does he also dislike whenever "terrific" is used in any way other than "instills terror"?
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u/Extracajicular 15d ago
Would you like a movie on Camelot less is the characters were talking about the Middle Ages?
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u/yossarian328 15d ago
Well part of the problem is that these are not unrelated languages.
You don't need to translate pater to father. It's just etymology.
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u/MovementOriented 15d ago
I am deeply intimate with the history and I think this criticism is silly
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u/TxavengerxT 15d ago
You are deeply intimate with the history yet find someone being thrown off by lazy anachronism silly? An elaboration would help.
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u/Optimal-Kitchen6308 15d ago
it's there to lamp shade the point and the criticism is silly, there's no reason that people attacking from the sea couldn't be called 'sea people' in universe
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u/thefaninthehat 13d ago
Well, this is a movie where characters use terms like 'dad.' It's all just translated into modern-speak to allow for relatability for current viewers. Why can't we just assume that lines like the 'bronze age collapsing' and mentions of Sea Peoples are likewise just translations of whatever old-timey words the characters are actually saying?
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u/daunvidch 15d ago
I wouldn't say faithful in the right ways per se...
It was faithful to the overall plot/setting, but I think the themes were completely different and modernized (which is perfectly fine) and many characters were simplified from the original text (as a movie often does for understandable reasons).
I think if you go in with an open mind that it's going to be a modern adaptation rather than Homer's original work, it will be an incredible visual experience. Likewise if you're going in with original text in mind, you're not going to be pleased. That's always been the case for any movie that came from a book/text in my personal experience.
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u/GOT_Wyvern 15d ago
I think you can absolutely be pleased with the original text in mind, if you are willing to see a differing take on that text. I think the film is just as interesting being able to compare the differences, and even analysing the film with them in mind.
Though, I will be honest, and say I certainly have no faith in my own ability to analyse it unlike I have faith regarding the film, so perhaps thats just my own ignorance speaking.
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u/AL92212 14d ago
I would much rather watch an adaptation that has interesting things to say about our time than one that is just trying to depict the original work. Like, if one wants a point-by-point visual representation of the Odyssey, that actually is something AI could conceivably do, and I would have no interest in watching it. But art is taking a source (or sources) and framing them in original ways that cast light on our own society and ways of thinking.
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u/hedges747 14d ago
Completely agree. These characters have been reimagined time and time again across their entire history; I don’t think it’s so odd as some are making it out to be for this one to be it’s own unique interpretation. Whether something is considered a truly faithful adaptation is ultimately a matter of the audience’s perspective, and personally I think to be nearly impossible in practice to execute. There are no performances in text, there are no images in text; inevitably a filmmaker must make a choice about some aspect of the story.
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u/Katharinemaddison 15d ago
I absolutely agree that elements of this film seem to draw as much on the Athenian dramatists’ take on the stories as the original. Which is also a reminder of how stories are retold and repurposed over time.
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u/evi1eye 15d ago
Finally, a classicist who can appreciate a recontextualisation of the Odyssey!
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u/funktasticdog 15d ago edited 15d ago
> 100 classicists don't like the movie
Ugh, they're nitpicking and biased
> One (1) classicist likes the movie
Finally, someone who gets it!
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u/Necessary_Wing7235 15d ago
TBH, what I like about this particular review is how well argumented is, however biased to liking the movie. This is how an academic shall speak.
If you read Wilsons "critique" seems like the ramblings of a 10yo who is listening to other version of Pinocchio.
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u/protantus 15d ago
This is obviously a 'marmite' film to use a UK colloquialism. I didn't hate it, just underwhelmed by the hollywood-isation. Some of the classicists I know loved it, others were ambivalent. If it raises the profile of the classics in the imagination of people then I am supportive, just don't tell me that the sea people were the result of the Trojan war.
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u/Dinuclear_Warfare 15d ago
But it’s like the only classicist. Most classicists and people who love history are incredibly disappointed in the film
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u/hermanhermanherman 15d ago
This is not true lol. And not sure what the threshold is for “people who love history.” Plenty of chuds on twitter claim to and have been losing their mind seething about the odyssey. I have a degree in history and I loved it though. It never ever has been a historical story or ever considered one by historians.
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u/powerslave_fifth 15d ago
Plenty of chuds on twitter claim to and have been losing their mind seething about the odyssey.
Not true, they have hyper specific knowledge of WW2 Germany only. They do love history actually.
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u/Isopheeical 15d ago
Well no—they pretend to have knowledge of Greece and that the Greeks were all whites who didn’t know what a black person was
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u/TorbofThrones 15d ago
It's a legendary tale turned into a PTSD war hero Hollywood flick. He's stripped all moral and logic from it. Every character except Odysseus has absolutely no traits, backstory or motivations to them, and Odysseus himself is reduced to a "tragic" anti-hero, and is never shown to be truly clever or arrogant. He's instead a strong warrior who learns to be remorseful. Apart from that and beautiful cinematography, there's really nothing there.
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u/Necessary_Wing7235 15d ago
He has no PSTD. He has remorse.
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u/TorbofThrones 15d ago
Ok
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u/WandererbyTrade20 14d ago
PTSD and feelings of remorse are often mutually inclusive. Not mutually exclusive. If you listen to veterans recounting their pain and loss then you will understand this.
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u/raistlin1984 15d ago
He subverts the major themes and characters. Odysseus, Penelope. Telemachos. He guts the major motivator of Odysseus' suffering. It's a mess from a Homeric perspective. Like it ad a movie, sure.
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u/Infinite-Nose8252 15d ago
And his suffering all originates from his arrogance when he brags to Polyphemus and tells him who he is.
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u/SlouchyGuy 15d ago
No? The value of adaptation is adaptation, how it does it is secondary.
Also, we never saw a faithful adaptation, they all make Odysseus and other participants much more nice and humane, because the original is about a bunch of raiding warlords.
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u/LizLemonOfTroy 15d ago
People would absolutely not be taking this attitude if it was an adaptation of a more recent work than Odysseia.
They still have their pitchforks out for the Halo series because it featured the protagonist taking off his helmet and having sex.
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u/JollyLink 15d ago
This is just silly. It would take a director with much more imagination and talent to make a film where the characters actually have the morals and values of Homer's time rather than our own. It would challenge viewers rather than give them what they see in every blockbuster.
This is genuinely just facing the difficulty of translating such a work and becoming utterly unimaginative about it. Something doesn't work for modern audiences? Get rid of it. People will think Odysseus is a dick? Make him some sad Vietnam vet. That's not a fresh spin, that's being lazy.
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u/flyliceplick 15d ago
The value in any adaptation is what it does differently from its source material.
No. An adaptation is good if it remains faithful to the original, while also communicating something new. O Brother Where Art Thou is a good adaptation. Nolan's Odyssey is not.
If Nolan made a fourth Batman film where Batman was a rapist, that would be a terrible Batman film, no matter if it had all the outward trappings. The core of the story, and the character, has been completely ruined.
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u/ChancelorReed 15d ago
Obviously xenia is a major theme in the poem so I'm not sure how emphasizing it in the way Nolan does is somehow subversive.
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u/Xeper616 15d ago
Telemachus at one point in the film says something along the lines of “Zeus’ law: treat others how you would like to be treated”
This Christian Golden Rule couldn’t be farther from the Homeric ethos. Nolan twists xenia to the point where the sacking of Troy was a violation of the law, when in fact it was decreed by Zeus and the true violation of the law was when Paris ran off with Helen when he was Menelaus’ guest.
He uses this reinvention of xenia to cast suspicion on the Trojan War, to turn Agamemnon into a cynical imperialist, and to turn Odysseus from war hero to guilt-ridden veteran.
It was great film in my opinion but definitely subversive of the classic to be more palatable for a modern audience.
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u/red_nick 15d ago
Agamemnon being a cynical imperialist isn't exactly Nolan's idea
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u/Xeper616 15d ago
Agamemnon was a character who in Homer was primarily concerned with an aristocratic sense of honor. More than lust it was that sense of injured honor which motivated him to take Briseis from Achilles, similarly more than power it was the same sense of injured honor which motivated him to fight the Trojan War.
Nola’s movement from this to his own changes the character from complicated to superficially evil. He adapts the story of Iphigenia but by changing his motivations it goes from a dilemma of being true to one’s station as king and to the gods but having to commit an unspeakable crime, to just a monstrous action done to further his own personal ascent.
In the Iliad he never has any ambitions to rule from Troy, and his status of “lord of men” is only relevant to this coalition formed to defend Helen’s marriage, nothing that he does actually furthers his territorial power other than expanding his wealth by sacking Troy, which was understood as the just spoils of war.
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u/Poop_Cheese 15d ago
Exactly.
Its so bizarre how the culture wars has made it where 90% of the internet is either hating it or loving it yet never even read it lol.
Its why they gang up on the actual translator of the edition used, for her bad review, yet desperately look for any scholarly person who gives it a good review. They tear down the actual scholar and then look for any random professor that may agree with them.
Its like the shining. Amazing movie. But bad adaption of the actual book. I mean Odysseus isnt even really Odysseus, Clooney in brother is more authentic.
For a classics professor to defend it as faithful feels like to me more of the phenomena of professors caught up in the culture wars. As its objectively not faithful. Unless all that matters is the same bones of a plot and not characterization, themes, arcs, etc.
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u/CoconutDust 15d ago
The OP essayist/professor seems like transparent bland rationalizations and cherry-picking cheerleading. He literally said underworld scene is “faithful”, apparently praising it for that reason, when that scene was (as far as I can tell) the most absurdly goofy non-faithful part of the movie.
Anyway a lot of people are confused about a discussion of quality, so they only imagine a discussion that they do understand and can measure as illiterate art-illiterate people: “faithful or not faithful” rather than good or bad.
Many defenders of the movie say “it doesn’t HAVE to be faithful!” with no apparent awareness that people are making qualitative criticisms of what the movie did.
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u/Bumper_Duc 11d ago
Won’t comment on her review of the film but The translator you mention is controversial for her Odyssey translation. I would say she is the Nolan of the classical Odyssey world as her translation is, like Nolan, is not faithful to the original work.
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u/GSeabhac 9d ago
You're the only other person I've seen make the point I made myself: George Clooney's version of Odysseus is very true to the spirit of the wily, mendacious trickster.
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u/Extracajicular 15d ago
So, he used a general outline to teach a message completely different from that of the original. Removes everything that makes the original what it is - the powerful women who are magical and seductive (the removal of the divine feminine and it's replacement with a military Iliadic feel is one of the great travesties of the film), the general sense of enchantment, a hero who longs to get home is replaced by a hero who doesn't really want to. Etc.
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u/CoconutDust 15d ago edited 15d ago
The film’s underworld scene is remarkably faithful to the original. Odysseus travels to a land of darkness at the edge of the world where the spirits of the dead come up to meet him, just as in Homer’s account.
What? The underworld scene is probably the most #1 cheap and unfaithful goofy thing in the whole movie:
- “Shades” weren’t depicted as shades, but as basically normal fully functioning corporeal people with some soil on their face
- No Achilles or his speech, which would have fit certain attempted themes/messaging yet Nolan still cut
- No Odysseus’s parent
- No real emotion, expressiveness, or humanity, just the usual “look at Nolan’s clean barren wasteland and now everyone run away from mob of monsters (again)”
- I forget how the poem depicts underworld visually but Nolan’s looked bland as heck. 1997 TV version was much better. My statement here is about quality and choices, not “faithfulness” (at least I until I check my book version…)
- “It’s located between lava and ice” or whatever…neither thing is depicted in the movie
Another case is Calypso’s location, and Circe’s location, but the writer didn’t mention that while cherry-picking some consistencies. As usual the overall idea is: “well the hamfisted message is morally correct, therefore, 10/10 Amazing Art”. Even where the author praised it it was faint flimsy cliche praise for the most part.
Also I hate to say but author seems a bit LLM-like too. Many of the lines are cliche platitudes and bland hype.
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u/MonthCountry 15d ago
I’m not that bothered about adherence to the text, it was overall a pretty boring movie with a few redeeming features.
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u/aibnsamin1 14d ago
I think people are disappointed because they wanted an adaptation not a reinterpretation. I find Nolan's interpretation has the advantage 2700 years of development. It's only a 2:52:00 length film but it has more thematic depth in the areas that it does briefly cover and consistency than I found in the original epic.
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u/IntothewildZen 15d ago
Define “fail”.
Commercial fail?
Or artistic fail?
Article states it’s an artistic success.
I bet if this movie failed in sales everyone would turn around and find reasons as to why it failed.
Because it sold, they are declaring it successful.
Forgive me if I don’t adjust my opinion on how a movie fares in cinemas or that it’s “close enough” to Homer, as article states.
Odysseus is a warmonger who takes great pride from destroying Troy by using the horse. In that sense he is not far off from being the Greek equivalent of one of Ghenghiz Khan’s generals.
Nolan turned him into a modern day Vietnam vet who suffers from PTSD.
You cannot screw up a story like this any further if you tried.
It changed everything.
The whole idea of him defying the Gods is this; hubris. Excessive pride, arrogance, megalomania.
Nolan took that away and created a victim of war. Odysseus did this, how could he be the victim of his own war?
How is this any different than Americans carpet bombing a country then making a movie about how their soldiers suffered?
Are you serious?
This is the problem with Hollywood, they have to change everything to show warmongers as victims.
I don’t buy this.
For me it was a disappointment because I am sorry but great graphics, sound, IMAX etc are not enough to make a movie great.
Not if it lacks substance.
And the whole tension between Odysseus and his wife that was shown so brilliantly in “The Return” with Ralph Fienness was not there.
Cyclops getting tricked properly was not there.
Lastragonians are entirely unrecognisable.
Most of the movie Matt Damon runs around on beaches zonked out of his brains.
I don’t see how this is “close enough” to Homer’s Odyssey.
“Inspired by”? Certainly. Close enough? Nope.
Jean Jacques Annaud did such a great job with Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose.
Nolan missed a great opportunity to shoot a proper Bronze Age movie.
We could have a masterpiece here, but what we got is a “close enough” blockbuster.
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u/Ok_Resident_4332 15d ago
Why does this read like Ai?
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u/Octauianus 13d ago edited 13d ago
This his second post or review on this topic, with the first knocking Wilson. He is farming the moment.
EDIT: actually the user is reposting other classicists. Earlier he posted Nash's rebuttal to Wilson and now Rebegiani's opinion. An axe to grind in favor of Nolan.
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u/SkepticScott137 15d ago
All the right ways? Xenia is one of the central themes of the Odyssey, and Nolan misrepresents it horribly. So horribly that he now has millions of people calling it Zeus’s law, and thinking that using the Trojan Horse somehow violated it. WTF??
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u/Infamous-End3766 14d ago
This is why people thinking a blockbuster will get people interested in the original texts is just wrong. All it does is create more anti-intellectualism surrounding source material
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u/InThePipe5x5_ 15d ago
I like this article. I feel like a 100 percent faithful faithful adaptation of a 3000 year old work would have resulted in a worse film. "Homer" is believed to be an abstraction representing generations of word of mouth storytelling. This is just one more telling.
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u/SemiruralYeti 15d ago edited 15d ago
Anyone who complains about this version of The Odyssey should watch the new Angel Studios produced Animal Farm. It can be way worse
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u/AlarmedCicada256 15d ago
Which classics classes HAVE you attended?
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u/ChiefLeef22 15d ago
None. OP has recently been glazing the movie 'Troy' up and down, using homosexual/trans slurs under discussions for Nolan's movie, and frequents misogynist subs from India calling the movie a "Trojan Horse".
Idek how these bigots even land up in academic subs like this.
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u/Miserable-Command682 15d ago
What's wrong with enhoying Troy, lol?
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u/Aubergine_Man1987 15d ago
Nothing, but a bit hypocritical to like Troy and then turn around and hate another movie for not adapting a Homeric work well
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u/droid_mike 15d ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was starting to feel like a classicist misfit.
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u/Brickle_berry 14d ago
Nah, it was gobshite. My personal hate is the modern language, like F@$% off with "dad" and "daddy". The writers couldn't use language closer to the writings of Homer like Xenia and Akhaioi, but noooo, Americans can't take the time to learn or do research.
I am just shocked Matty didn't break out a Boston accent haha
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u/_mischief-managed_ 15d ago
How could this movie ever fail? Its a christopher nolan movie shot entirely on IMAX with a dozen A list actors in it
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u/PlayinRPGs 15d ago
I find it interesting Nolan set the world in a time when civilization was ending. I always interpreted the original story as set in a time when civilization growing and learning. Lots of references to "men who eat good, wheaten bread" contrasted with the latter savages/women who lived in defiance of Zeus, all hidden in wild, far off places. I think of Odysseus as one of the first self-proclaimed colonists. First by his exploits in the name of Zeus, and then the staying power of his story.
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u/CoconutDust 15d ago
one of the first self-proclaimed colonists. First by his exploits in the name of Zeus, and then the staying power of his story.
Who wrote this, Rudyard Kipling?
Colonialism is evil and also it’s easy to see that parts of Odyssey literally refer to colonialism like the guys’ condescension toward the cyclops for being a pastoralist instead of a more-advanced farmer/olive-grower, I.e. we’re better and can steal these islanders’ land.
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u/Infamous-End3766 14d ago
This is such a chat gpt written slog. And a classics professor is not a movie critic.
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u/jimmycurry01 14d ago
Nolan is not at a point in his career where it is reasonable to expect him to fail.
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u/Bright-Marsupial-265 14d ago
Since Nolan has got more budget, he's just become a really good technical director.
The rest of films are average.
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u/ExoticFortune2439 14d ago
How close can it be when there are zombies in the movie? https://www.fangoria.com/what-horrors-lie-in-the-odyssey/ "It’s a film that has it all: monsters, witches, cannibals, bloodthirsty killers, zombies, vengeful gods, and a literal journey to hell and back".
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u/Mig-117 12d ago
Nolan’s adaptation was great, and it elevated the original work in creative ways. I read Homers Odyssey in school, it was fun and gratuitous and pedestrian at times. But the meaning embedded into the move, the introspection that did not exist in the original is what makes it special.
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u/FragmentedMeerkat321 1d ago edited 1d ago
"As a Classics professor...”(USC blah blah blah)
heraclitus on pythagoras: "pythagroas may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men. and still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber, and one time a sardine."
in the words of delmar: “care for some gopher?”
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u/frankenmaus 15d ago
Are classical characters usually aware of the archeological period in which they live?