Fair enough about the other points. But this is a ridiculous "hot take":
> There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.
Yes and if there were sex scenes, then the film would get criticized for having sex scene(s), not being able to tell the story of a Greek epic without turning it into erotica or something.
I'm not a scholar of Greek history but as layman, I thought it was good and good enough to recommend. Visually it is quite beautiful and despite what the review states it does have an ethical thread at its core it follows. There are some choices I just don't understand; the armor, mostly the Trojans and Agamemnon's, looks like something that would be on a low budget scifi tv show and jamming a bunch of well known celebrities in bit parts is just distracting. If you can get behind a pretty, modern day take, on the story I would give it a shot.
I read a couple comments from an extra who had worn the same costume in at least 2 other films.
Between that, the Viking Longboat and the name brand actors falling out of every hole, my instinct is that he was asked to tune the film for a very particular budget/advertising campaign and had little to work with outside of that.
Its like, yes you can film here, here and here, and have weird custom shit here, but these actors will fill seats for marketing so you need to pay them, and then make do with whatever money is left.
When the whole world is fawning over this movie that I was so underwhelmed by, this review provides a well-reasoned, well-written explanation for everything that I found severely lacking in the movie, but was unable to articulate myself, having never read the original.
Not that you need knowledge of the original to plainly see that there was no depth to the movie, in any regard. I felt and thought nothing during it, let alone after. That's the definition of not Artful.
Moreover, it vindicates Homer and makes me want to read the original (which I apparently had bought on audiobook ages ago and never listened to. At 12 hours, I expect to finish in the coming weeks).
It did an excellent job of articulating the causes of what I experienced: a movie that lacked the emotional impact of the poem. A movie that failed for me despite some spectacular visuals.
As someone who has read the Odyssey in original, and who has enjoyed it very much, the useful information that I got from this review is that most of what I considered as the best parts of Odyssey are exactly those which are missing from this movie.
This review, like a few other reviews that I have seen, concludes that Nolan's Odyssey is not a bad movie, it is not boring and it has some spectacular scenes, so it may be worth viewing, but it definitely is not Homer's Odyssey at all.
I always dislike when American movies take the name from some classic work of literature, but then they change the story completely and frequently even contradictory to the original.
Nolan had a story that he wanted to show, which did not match any Ancient Greek story, and he should have better done this without calling it "The Odyssey", which creates false expectations, though an unknown name might have generated less publicity and it might have tempted less people to see what it is about.
I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review.
Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition to the plotline, as unrealistic as it is.
This may blow your mind, but what if the "People From the Sea" are Odysseus, his family, and his crew?
* It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea. Did anyone outside of this group mention the People From the Sea? Was anyone outside of the group anticipating, terrified, or already terrorized by some other group?
* Ithaca is an island kingdom; anyone who lives there is a sailor by experience, and all of Greece is a region of islands and archipelagos
* Odysseus and his crew had not seen them or found them, because they are not sufficiently self-aware or spiritual
* They violated the Law of Zeus. All of them.
* That's why the Trojan Horse didn't have wheels. It was terrible to drag across dry land, but it was made of buoyant wood. It was a seahorse.
* Everyone they met, from the Trojans to Circe to Calypso and the Cyclopes, obesrved them to approach from the sea, land on the shore, and leave the same way
* They (Odysseus and his family) ultimately attacked Ithaca (the suitors)
* Odysseus, his wife and son go into exile by boat, and sail west, [beyond Gibraltar], thus permanently becoming People Of The Sea
* The Odyssey is a myth, fiction, legendary, and none of its characters actually existed
* The People From the Sea are not mentioned in Homer's text. They're extra-canonical. They were hypothesized, starting in the 19th century.
The term "Sea People" or "People of the Sea" has been taken from Egyptian documents that described a series of battles for defending Egypt against them.
Egypt succeeded to repel them, but other regions were not so lucky, because around the same time a lot of cities were destroyed. Because of the coincidence in time, it is assumed that the Egyptians have fought against the same people who destroyed the other cities.
There are also documents from Ugarit, written immediately before that city was destroyed, which requested help because they expected an imminent attack, but it was too late and the city was destroyed before receiving any help.
The documents do not contain enough information to identify who were the attackers, but there is no doubt that attacks existed and they destroyed many cities in Greece, Crete, Anatolia and in the territory of modern Syria.
Yes, while I agree with most of the criticism about the movie, that sentence has also stricken me as incorrect.
It is not known who the "sea people" were, e.g. whether they were invaders coming from far away or they were just some poorer local populations that had revolted in a time of famine, but what is known for sure is that a lot of cities around the Eastern Mediterranean have been destroyed and burned during several decades, and this has resulted in the disappearance of several centralized kingdoms, leaving only a few surviving big states, i.e. Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, while everywhere else no central authorities remained and the territories were fragmented into small independent parts, consisting mostly of a city and its neighborhoods.
[1] is a nice intro into what the current scientific consensus in what caused the Bronze Age collapse is, written by historian Bret Devereaux. The view he paints pretty much aligns with what Wilson wrote about there being no such thing as the "sea people".
Well the author, an expert in Homer, doesn't hold punches that's for sure.
It also shows a literature critic doesn’t really translate into a film critic because this piece is borderline pedantic about the adaptation script and not the movie as a whole.
"But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before."
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Odysseus, in the poem, is a bit of a monster by modern standards. He's intemperate, devious, unfaithful, greedy, and excessively violent in all the very human ways that modern Hollywood heroes aren't. Homeric Greeks were basically pirates, and not the Hollywood kind either! One of the epithets commonly applied to Odysseus in the poems is "sacker of cities", and that's in a very literal sense.
Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get into the mental space of the bronze age Achaeans. In a three hour movie that's a lot harder to do.
> Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get into the mental space of the bronze age Achaeans. In a three hour movie that's a lot harder to do.
And this is the strongest criticism of this movie - Nolan took the easy way out of just shoving the story in 21st century America instead of doing the work of transporting us into the world of different values and beliefs. It's an easy snack for infantilised audience who isn't trusted to actually engage into something that steps out of their locally cultural space.
It's about the most damning thing about this movie.
This is insightful but entirely tangential to the heart of the quote you posted.
"... the Homeric poems easily clear the bar [of showing the perspectives of both victims and perpatrators]"
Homer's writing was very empathetic to Odysseus's victims. The movie sanitized the tragedy.
This quote is also easily misinterpreted: "But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world."
A warlord from those times would not be reluctant. War was central to life, considered a duty of a leader in those times, but not in the sense of piracy as you put it. To grow and increase wealth was to protect your kingdom and increase odds of surviving not only war but downturns of all types.
> > We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t.
Reacting to the article and not OP here, also spoilers:
I'm sorry, I know the movie was long, but did OP miss the Bronze-age Darth Vader with bones on his head? The very classic Nolan ending twist that Athena was a PTSD hallucination of the Trojan woman they killed? The constant and obvious murdering and pillaging that Odysseus and his crew do? That the Trojans were wearing white and the Greeks were wearing black? The very obvious scene where all the people that they have killed tell Odysseus that he is a bad guy and then they all go running after him and the crew?
Like, to me, I felt that it was over-the-top obvious, almost embarrassingly so from such a director, that the Greeks were the bad guys. He could not have communicated that more or better to my eyes. He comes out and says so at the ~90% mark. It is very clear.
But, and I apologize if I am also guilty of this sin with the article, it seems that he does not even still do enough to communicate that to many viewers.
[after a pretty scathing review which I mostly agree with]
> Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.
It's a movie for theaters and not a flashback edgy post; the success of the work is about pleasing the audience. That is already a thing in Homer's original Odyssey, at least as I read it in high school. But now with a few more decades on my ribs, I can quickly find out that the text that I read came from oral traditions that spanned from 1200 to 600 BCE, and after finding its way to written form, a cultural chain of transliterations:
Each age was obsessed with something, and the latest stages in that chain are heavily marked by Christian values. So, yeah, swords and explosion and stuff and don't do anything we would consider obscene today which includes sex, though movie directors are completely unabashed about bloody horror. To me, it's not a reflection on the director, but on his audience and their society.
I’d agree, but would argue that Nolan has a unique (almost Delphic) talent - for better or worse - amongst contemporary Hollywood directors for capturing and reflecting contemporary and near-future textures and preoccupations, and this alone makes his work more interesting, and worthy of critical attention, than your comment seems to imply if I have interpreted it correctly.
I think that’s just as true of his lesser films (Tenet capturing COVID’s barely comprehensible, antiseptic-psychedelic temporality, for example) as in his stronger work, and makes him - to me, at least - a very interesting artist within the Hollywood structure.
It was a good entertaining movie. I found all the online right-wing hysteria about this really silly and stupid. The moral of the story should actually appeal to reasonable moderates everywhere: Zeus's Law, whereby strangers (refugees/immigrants) are welcomed, should not be taken advantage of, ie when the strangers (refugees/immigrants) misbehave and spit in the faces on their hosts, lest they break the culture and tolerance that allowed them to be welcomed in the first place.
> But there were unspoken conditions to our acceptance, and that was the secret we were meant to glean on our own: we had to be grateful. The hate wasn’t about being darker, or from elsewhere. It was about being those things and daring to be unaware of it. As refugees, we owed them our previous identity. We had to lay it at their door like an offering, and gleefully deny it to earn our place in this new country. There would be no straddling. No third culture here.
> That was the key to being embraced by the population of our town, a community that openly took credit for the fact that we were still alive, but wanted to know nothing of our past. Month after month, my mother was asked to give her testimony in churches and women’s groups, at schools and even at dinners. I remember sensing the moment when all conversation would stop and she would be asked to repeat our escape story. The problem, of course, was that they wanted our salvation story as a talisman, no more. No one ever asked what our house in Iran looked like, what fruits we grew in our yard, what books we read, what music we loved and what it felt like now not to understand any of the songs on the radio. No one asked if we missed our cousins or grandparents or best friends. No one asked what we did in summers or if we had any photos of the Caspian Sea. “Men treat women horribly there, don’t they?” the women would ask. Somehow it didn’t feel OK to tell them about my funny dad with his pockets full of sour cherries, or my grandpa who removed his false teeth when he told ghost stories.
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.
It wasn't enough for Emily Wilson (an upper class white British American woman) to include black people in the cast, they should've been the protagonists.
Can you imagine if a film adaptation of the Epic of Sundiata had white actors ? The whole western world would stop spinning.
I really wish all those senseless racial tensions of the US had not spilled over to the rest of us.
Nobody in France would bat an eyelid if a movie had white only cast, as nobody would bat an eyelid if a movie had black only cast.
French filmmakers have been criticized within France for white-only casting going back to at least the 1980s. By the time that sub-Saharan African, Arab and Southeast Asian faces were a normal feature of French city streets, white-only casting struck many as tone-deaf and stuck in the past.
I think that the point is simply that the casting failed at the implicit goal of being in some way progressive (and was probably a marketing stunt). Who cares if French people would be fine with a homogeneous movie? It was made in America.
When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".
Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.
When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":
Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward:
What was the artist trying to achieve?
Did he/she succeed?
The third's a zinger:
Was it worth doing?
Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.
This is the person who created one of the translations this movie is based on (arguably THE translation Nolan based it on), so they - literally as it goes - indeed have tried and done better.
People increasingly do not understand that there can be nuanced criticism of things they liked.
It seems like most people can still understand, "I didn't care for it." Even if sometimes even that's too much to bear.
But I've observed that the expansion into, "I noticed some problems, and I'll articulate them" seems to get bluntly polarized into something much less generous.
"I'd like to see you do better" is a run of the mill response to criticism. Which overall demonstrates a lack of maturity / confidence in ones own taste.
For the record, I loved the movie. I thought some parts were odd. I found this piece interesting.
> Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, The Death of Socrates and a biography of Seneca. She has also translated Seneca and Euripides as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.
Orthogonal to the movie/review, but if I could upvote this 100 times I would. These 3 questions were drilled to me in an elective Study of Visual Arts course in college and changed how I thought about everything and everyone.
> When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"
This feels like a pretty shallow take on a what seemed to me like a pretty in depth and interesting review. Clearly there's a huge amount of potential ground that could have been covered in a film like this, so a critical look at what was and wasn't included, the angles that were chosen, the parts that were glossed over etc. can be revealing. Put another way, I think the review is a pretty in depth look at the questions "what was the artist trying to achieve?" and "Did they succeed?".
The article seems to me just a regular criticism, not her saying she could do better?
Counterpoint to your view on critics. A discerning audience is equally as important to a thriving culture as artists. If critics just clap their hands whenever someone tries to make something, granting that making a bad work of art is often just as difficult as making a good one, we get junk. I don't see why the perspective of the maker is relevant at all.
“You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.” - Pauline Kael
im getting more of a "books are better than movies" feeling from the review. pretty weary take because, yeah, duh. Everyone whos read a book and then seen the adaptation figured this out when they were 9 reading Tolkien
This didn't read at all as "I could have done it better" and there's no way for any one person to create that movie, so of course she couldn't have done it better. Every single criticism of any kind will read as "I could have done it better" because the criticism points out flaws in the thing.
How is that "disarmingly straightforward"? Does that mean it's a straightforward question for anyone to answer because it's obvious, or that it's straightforward for the viewer of the art because in that case the answer could be anything? If the former, that's an incredibly difficult question to answer and kind of nullifies the point of this entire exercise.
"Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely."
To imply in the first paragraph that a) Nolen's films are boring and b) that it's impossible to make a bad Odyssey movie because the source is so good, made me eye roll so hard I automatically stopped reading and closed my browser tab
I agree the movie was underwhelming: the characters were underdeveloped and dialogue clunky. It didn't evoke many emotions, and is trying to do too much, which makes the plot bounce all over the place. I get that it's probably hard to put your own spin into a well-established epic like The Odyssey, but this version wasn't too memorable to me. I liked the film better toward the end, but probably won't rewatch it in a long time, if ever. I'll give it a 4/5 for its production quality, but wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone who's asking. Essentially, it's a decent action movie with a lot of famous actors and a cool ancient setting.
I liked the comparison and expectations based on the source material as I have never read Homer's Odyssey. If anything, the movie inspired me to read The Odyssey.
> Zeus’ law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus. Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.
Maybe I watched a different movie, but there were monsters, giants, cyclops, nymphs and sirens. Why do you need to see the god if you see their offspring laying waste to the world?
"A complicated man" is a stupid translation in the first place
Polytropos means: a man of many twists and turns, describing simultaneously a person who has traveled widely and been "turned" by many hardships and places, as well as someone whose mind is clever, resourceful, versatile, and cunning enough to turn any situation to their advantage
Or as W2 academics chasing book reviews and podcasts slots translate: "a complicated guy"
the perfect actor would be someone with james bond spy thriller feeling not commercial guy that has the energy of a little league coach
Every translation has to make tradeoffs. There's no way to perfectly translate a 2500 year old poem whose audience had an almost unfathomably different world view than a modern audience.
Wilson chose to prioritize making the translation uncomplicated and metrical the way it would have been to the original audience instead of trying to capture the full meaning of every single word. No other translation has done that before. They either aren't in meter or they torture the English language into strange and complicated grammar that has a very different effect on the audience than the original would have.
If you want different tradeoffs, then there are countless other translations to choose from. There would be no point writing a new translation if you aren't going to choose different tradeoffs.
> This muddled subplot is foisted on the film in order to make Nolan’s relentlessly didactic point about the contemporary Anglophone world: that the lies and xenophobia of the war on terror and Brexit began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear.
After just seeing the film, I've got say, "Nolan trying to make a point about Brexit" did not cross my mind. I guess she is relating the "be nice to beggers" narrative to being pro-immigration?
A number of her critiques come down doing things that make the "good guys" likable and the "bad guys" unlikable to modern audiences. That's reasonable, but it's also pretty understandable that Nolan didn't want to add "cruelty to animals" and "abusing women".
"The Odyssey is The Hero's Journey without a hero" - a quote about this adaptation referencing Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I'm wondering if today films (the main form of story telling) also do not quite follow the apparently universal and archetypical story structure outlined by Campbell. Maybe these story structures are not actually universal across all cultures or maybe it's a sign of the culture that tells the stories. Wrt this movie, I think it does kind of fit in with a few of the structures but I've not seen any deeper analysis.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 58.2 ms ] threadA pretty succinct summation of Nolan as a filmmaker.
> There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.
Yes and if there were sex scenes, then the film would get criticized for having sex scene(s), not being able to tell the story of a Greek epic without turning it into erotica or something.
I read a couple comments from an extra who had worn the same costume in at least 2 other films.
Between that, the Viking Longboat and the name brand actors falling out of every hole, my instinct is that he was asked to tune the film for a very particular budget/advertising campaign and had little to work with outside of that.
Its like, yes you can film here, here and here, and have weird custom shit here, but these actors will fill seats for marketing so you need to pay them, and then make do with whatever money is left.
Not that you need knowledge of the original to plainly see that there was no depth to the movie, in any regard. I felt and thought nothing during it, let alone after. That's the definition of not Artful.
Moreover, it vindicates Homer and makes me want to read the original (which I apparently had bought on audiobook ages ago and never listened to. At 12 hours, I expect to finish in the coming weeks).
This review, like a few other reviews that I have seen, concludes that Nolan's Odyssey is not a bad movie, it is not boring and it has some spectacular scenes, so it may be worth viewing, but it definitely is not Homer's Odyssey at all.
I always dislike when American movies take the name from some classic work of literature, but then they change the story completely and frequently even contradictory to the original.
Nolan had a story that he wanted to show, which did not match any Ancient Greek story, and he should have better done this without calling it "The Odyssey", which creates false expectations, though an unknown name might have generated less publicity and it might have tempted less people to see what it is about.
Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition to the plotline, as unrealistic as it is.
* It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea. Did anyone outside of this group mention the People From the Sea? Was anyone outside of the group anticipating, terrified, or already terrorized by some other group?
* Ithaca is an island kingdom; anyone who lives there is a sailor by experience, and all of Greece is a region of islands and archipelagos
* Odysseus and his crew had not seen them or found them, because they are not sufficiently self-aware or spiritual
* They violated the Law of Zeus. All of them.
* That's why the Trojan Horse didn't have wheels. It was terrible to drag across dry land, but it was made of buoyant wood. It was a seahorse.
* Everyone they met, from the Trojans to Circe to Calypso and the Cyclopes, obesrved them to approach from the sea, land on the shore, and leave the same way
* They (Odysseus and his family) ultimately attacked Ithaca (the suitors)
* Odysseus, his wife and son go into exile by boat, and sail west, [beyond Gibraltar], thus permanently becoming People Of The Sea
* The Odyssey is a myth, fiction, legendary, and none of its characters actually existed
* The People From the Sea are not mentioned in Homer's text. They're extra-canonical. They were hypothesized, starting in the 19th century.
The term "Sea People" or "People of the Sea" has been taken from Egyptian documents that described a series of battles for defending Egypt against them.
Egypt succeeded to repel them, but other regions were not so lucky, because around the same time a lot of cities were destroyed. Because of the coincidence in time, it is assumed that the Egyptians have fought against the same people who destroyed the other cities.
There are also documents from Ugarit, written immediately before that city was destroyed, which requested help because they expected an imminent attack, but it was too late and the city was destroyed before receiving any help.
The documents do not contain enough information to identify who were the attackers, but there is no doubt that attacks existed and they destroyed many cities in Greece, Crete, Anatolia and in the territory of modern Syria.
It is not known who the "sea people" were, e.g. whether they were invaders coming from far away or they were just some poorer local populations that had revolted in a time of famine, but what is known for sure is that a lot of cities around the Eastern Mediterranean have been destroyed and burned during several decades, and this has resulted in the disappearance of several centralized kingdoms, leaving only a few surviving big states, i.e. Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, while everywhere else no central authorities remained and the territories were fragmented into small independent parts, consisting mostly of a city and its neighborhoods.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...
It also shows a literature critic doesn’t really translate into a film critic because this piece is borderline pedantic about the adaptation script and not the movie as a whole.
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Odysseus, in the poem, is a bit of a monster by modern standards. He's intemperate, devious, unfaithful, greedy, and excessively violent in all the very human ways that modern Hollywood heroes aren't. Homeric Greeks were basically pirates, and not the Hollywood kind either! One of the epithets commonly applied to Odysseus in the poems is "sacker of cities", and that's in a very literal sense.
Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get into the mental space of the bronze age Achaeans. In a three hour movie that's a lot harder to do.
And this is the strongest criticism of this movie - Nolan took the easy way out of just shoving the story in 21st century America instead of doing the work of transporting us into the world of different values and beliefs. It's an easy snack for infantilised audience who isn't trusted to actually engage into something that steps out of their locally cultural space.
It's about the most damning thing about this movie.
Looks pretty though.
"... the Homeric poems easily clear the bar [of showing the perspectives of both victims and perpatrators]"
Homer's writing was very empathetic to Odysseus's victims. The movie sanitized the tragedy.
This quote is also easily misinterpreted: "But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world."
A warlord from those times would not be reluctant. War was central to life, considered a duty of a leader in those times, but not in the sense of piracy as you put it. To grow and increase wealth was to protect your kingdom and increase odds of surviving not only war but downturns of all types.
Reacting to the article and not OP here, also spoilers:
I'm sorry, I know the movie was long, but did OP miss the Bronze-age Darth Vader with bones on his head? The very classic Nolan ending twist that Athena was a PTSD hallucination of the Trojan woman they killed? The constant and obvious murdering and pillaging that Odysseus and his crew do? That the Trojans were wearing white and the Greeks were wearing black? The very obvious scene where all the people that they have killed tell Odysseus that he is a bad guy and then they all go running after him and the crew?
Like, to me, I felt that it was over-the-top obvious, almost embarrassingly so from such a director, that the Greeks were the bad guys. He could not have communicated that more or better to my eyes. He comes out and says so at the ~90% mark. It is very clear.
But, and I apologize if I am also guilty of this sin with the article, it seems that he does not even still do enough to communicate that to many viewers.
> Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.
Archaic Greece -> Hellenistic Alexandria[^1] -> Roman Egypt -> Byzantine Constantinople -> Renaissance Italy
Each age was obsessed with something, and the latest stages in that chain are heavily marked by Christian values. So, yeah, swords and explosion and stuff and don't do anything we would consider obscene today which includes sex, though movie directors are completely unabashed about bloody horror. To me, it's not a reflection on the director, but on his audience and their society.
[^1]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103T4T
I think that’s just as true of his lesser films (Tenet capturing COVID’s barely comprehensible, antiseptic-psychedelic temporality, for example) as in his stronger work, and makes him - to me, at least - a very interesting artist within the Hollywood structure.
> That was the key to being embraced by the population of our town, a community that openly took credit for the fact that we were still alive, but wanted to know nothing of our past. Month after month, my mother was asked to give her testimony in churches and women’s groups, at schools and even at dinners. I remember sensing the moment when all conversation would stop and she would be asked to repeat our escape story. The problem, of course, was that they wanted our salvation story as a talisman, no more. No one ever asked what our house in Iran looked like, what fruits we grew in our yard, what books we read, what music we loved and what it felt like now not to understand any of the songs on the radio. No one asked if we missed our cousins or grandparents or best friends. No one asked what we did in summers or if we had any photos of the Caspian Sea. “Men treat women horribly there, don’t they?” the women would ask. Somehow it didn’t feel OK to tell them about my funny dad with his pockets full of sour cherries, or my grandpa who removed his false teeth when he told ghost stories.
From https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-nayeri-un...
Can you imagine if a film adaptation of the Epic of Sundiata had white actors ? The whole western world would stop spinning.
I really wish all those senseless racial tensions of the US had not spilled over to the rest of us.
Nobody in France would bat an eyelid if a movie had white only cast, as nobody would bat an eyelid if a movie had black only cast.
Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.
When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":
It seems like most people can still understand, "I didn't care for it." Even if sometimes even that's too much to bear.
But I've observed that the expansion into, "I noticed some problems, and I'll articulate them" seems to get bluntly polarized into something much less generous.
"I'd like to see you do better" is a run of the mill response to criticism. Which overall demonstrates a lack of maturity / confidence in ones own taste.
For the record, I loved the movie. I thought some parts were odd. I found this piece interesting.
It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.
This feels like a pretty shallow take on a what seemed to me like a pretty in depth and interesting review. Clearly there's a huge amount of potential ground that could have been covered in a film like this, so a critical look at what was and wasn't included, the angles that were chosen, the parts that were glossed over etc. can be revealing. Put another way, I think the review is a pretty in depth look at the questions "what was the artist trying to achieve?" and "Did they succeed?".
Counterpoint to your view on critics. A discerning audience is equally as important to a thriving culture as artists. If critics just clap their hands whenever someone tries to make something, granting that making a bad work of art is often just as difficult as making a good one, we get junk. I don't see why the perspective of the maker is relevant at all.
“You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.” - Pauline Kael
"What was the artist trying to achieve?"
How is that "disarmingly straightforward"? Does that mean it's a straightforward question for anyone to answer because it's obvious, or that it's straightforward for the viewer of the art because in that case the answer could be anything? If the former, that's an incredibly difficult question to answer and kind of nullifies the point of this entire exercise.
To imply in the first paragraph that a) Nolen's films are boring and b) that it's impossible to make a bad Odyssey movie because the source is so good, made me eye roll so hard I automatically stopped reading and closed my browser tab
I liked the comparison and expectations based on the source material as I have never read Homer's Odyssey. If anything, the movie inspired me to read The Odyssey.
> Zeus’ law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus. Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.
Maybe I watched a different movie, but there were monsters, giants, cyclops, nymphs and sirens. Why do you need to see the god if you see their offspring laying waste to the world?
Polytropos means: a man of many twists and turns, describing simultaneously a person who has traveled widely and been "turned" by many hardships and places, as well as someone whose mind is clever, resourceful, versatile, and cunning enough to turn any situation to their advantage
Or as W2 academics chasing book reviews and podcasts slots translate: "a complicated guy"
the perfect actor would be someone with james bond spy thriller feeling not commercial guy that has the energy of a little league coach
Wilson chose to prioritize making the translation uncomplicated and metrical the way it would have been to the original audience instead of trying to capture the full meaning of every single word. No other translation has done that before. They either aren't in meter or they torture the English language into strange and complicated grammar that has a very different effect on the audience than the original would have.
If you want different tradeoffs, then there are countless other translations to choose from. There would be no point writing a new translation if you aren't going to choose different tradeoffs.
> The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face.
Did she miss the most important scene in the burning of Troy that showed a Trojan victim's face that plays an important role the film?
After just seeing the film, I've got say, "Nolan trying to make a point about Brexit" did not cross my mind. I guess she is relating the "be nice to beggers" narrative to being pro-immigration?
A number of her critiques come down doing things that make the "good guys" likable and the "bad guys" unlikable to modern audiences. That's reasonable, but it's also pretty understandable that Nolan didn't want to add "cruelty to animals" and "abusing women".
I'm wondering if today films (the main form of story telling) also do not quite follow the apparently universal and archetypical story structure outlined by Campbell. Maybe these story structures are not actually universal across all cultures or maybe it's a sign of the culture that tells the stories. Wrt this movie, I think it does kind of fit in with a few of the structures but I've not seen any deeper analysis.