alt Hacker NewsAn Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan
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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:
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.
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.[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.
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.
To sum it up - the movie is not like the book.
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?
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 enjoyed her translation. Also really liked the movie. 10/10, trying to rewatch in IMAX without having to take front row seats.
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.
"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
> "The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality".
A pretty succinct summation of Nolan as a filmmaker.
Sometimes simplifying a story makes it more accessible, but there's always a risk of losing the depth that made the original timeless.
[spoiler alert]
> 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?
I haven't seen it yet, but how do people feel it compares to Lord of the Rings as an adaptation?
Take <standard hollywood mythoslop> add <overrated director who cant handle audio engineering> and apparently you get $$$$$$$$
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.
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 spill over to the rest of us.
Nobody in France would bat an eye if a movie had white only cast, as nobody would bat an eye if a movie had black only cast.
I read about 2/3rds of this before giving up. People who are upvoting it: what are you getting from this review that I'm missing, exactly?
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.
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 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.
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"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
"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.