"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."
----------
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.
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.
I did not read the odyssey yet, but I just finished the illiad and there the Warlords are measured in how much livestock they stole and Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share, which is measured in women.
Hectors wife is worried about her husband, and he tells her, that there is nothing to worry about, when he is dead, because if he dies, the city is sacked and she would become a slave and this would be that and since he would be dead, why should she worry then at all.
Oh and then there is the parley scene, where one of the main points is who gets whoms bronce armour after the duel is over.
> 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.
Does it though? Somehow Nolan made the mediterranean climate and Aegean sea look like washed out coast of Scotland or something. What's with the Hollywood's attack on color lately?
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.
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
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.
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.
It’s a magazine that I pay money for. I’m allowed to have an opinion on the reviews they include, and yes, some reviews are unnecessary in the sense that they are overly critical just for the sake of it.
I don’t think Wilson’s translation is very good, and ergo I think a snarky review putting down a film is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.
> 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.
They're pretty related endeavors. Not literally the same of course, but in both cases you're trying to convey something profoundly alien (because of its age) to a modern audience.
> 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?".
In a movie involving a few archery scenes, a movie with a gargantuan budget - hire an archery instructor. As an advanced amateur archer, the glaring mistakes, from stringing a bow to the draw form and release, it's hard to suspend disbelief and continue watching. Yes, it's a movie based on a myth, but it would have been that much better for me, only if they threw a couple of $Ks to an archery coach.
Same thing with movies with foreign languages. Folks, if you watch "The Hunt for Red October" or anything super recent from Hollywood where there is a Russian or Ukrainian dialogue, they don't speak Russian or Ukrainian. It's just a word salad, mostly.
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.
[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.
> "doing his best to get the general public reading again"
This seems very detached from reality. I very much doubt that many people seeing a movie like this will think "oh, I should read The Odyssey", or "I should read more." And most people who try the former are unlikely to get very far.
The author recently published a retranslation of the Odyssey, that has rocketed to the top of best seller lists thanks to the movie. I'm sure her bank account provides her plenty of direct evidence that this is happening.
“ Nevertheless, Wilson acknowledged the impact the film is already having on cultural awareness of ancient Greek literature as well as cinema itself. Saying “the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate,” she suggests: “This epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas … translations of Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves … [and] perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments.”
It reminds me of the recent claim about how AI is resulting in a booming job market for philosophers. Then when you look at it, it turns out single-digit numbers have been hired at Anthropic and OpenAI, and that’s about it.
The point is it’s unlikely to have some sort of significantly or lasting cultural impact, any more than say “The 300” or “Beowulf” or “Gods of Egypt” or any of the other quite long list of such movies did.
That was never to be the majority of the audience, but enough to keep the flame alive.
A lot of them will criticise the movie from departing from a text they never read, that they never understood the historical context. They’ll criticise it from being based on a relatively recent adaptation by a female author, which, BTW, is the author of the article. They will criticise not because they see a flaw in something, but because that’s their nature: in order to see themselves as sufficient, they need to see all others as lacking.
The most surprising to me was that a movie famously shot entirely on IMAX with real practical effects looks so bad. The shots are very often close-ups, with shaky action and extremely short DOF. Nothing is in focus for long enough to discover it.
When the rare wide panoramic shot appears it's flat sunlight on a featureless beach. Greece surely has great nature but it was not on display here.
Overall a very weird decision for the equipment being used IMO. Any quality IMAX brings is lost, or even hurts the experience due to the DOF or lack of light.
That's just my impression of course. I'm aware it has gotten praise for the visuals but can't understand why.
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.
It's not controversial. It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world. There has been some critics* of her translation among classicists, but not _controversies_.
*: which is only natural, that's their job to criticize each others' translations
>It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world.
I haven't read her version but I believe that's why I heard it criticised? That the culture war speeps into it.
In fact she keeps at it here "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."
The culture war does not speeps into the translation itself. There is literally no culture war in the book itself. Not even a hint of it.
What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war. You know, that black actor being in the movie is a great offense to the classic argument. It is ok to respond to it once that argument was made by powerful people with a lot of following.
The "she keeps at it" is weird considering this a review where commentary fully belongs and culture war thing was not started by Willson or even Nolan. They just made their things. Then other people made it into culture war. Then Willson responded to existing culture war claims in her review of the movie. Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions? And that if others respond then it retroactively invalidate their previous work?
>Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions?
No the underlying assumption is that there's no one side to such a thing named a culture war regardless of how much of an idiot musk is. Whitaker and the like criticised her for changing from the original according to personal biases and from her responses she quite alignes with those. There's a progressive perspective there that she does not deny and that i found mentioned in any praise of the translation.
One can't be claiming and praising progressive influences and then claim the detractors are imaginging them the next moment.
>What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war.
What she wrote is a response to the actual movie. We can assume it to be her opinions regardless.
And yes it does show a perspective that some would count as woke.
Things such as saying that filming in the western sahara is a normalisation of violence against the Sahrawi which 99% of viewers will not have heard of.
Saying that the perspective of the victims must be shown and incur horror in a movie portrarying war is not something that falls in line with those ancient retellings, it's her own progressive take regarding media in general.
The same with clamouring for pushing female characters forward in a deeply patriarchical tale or calling anything other than raceswapping the main character of greek mythos not progressive all point in that direction.
> 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".
With respect to Dr. Wilson, most of this reads like "A three hour movie didn't include every detail I've enjoyed during my lifetime of study." Every suggested addition just reminded me how bad I had to go to the restroom by the end of the film. It reads more like comic book fans complaining about film adaptations than a serious review.
Some of the criticism is just downright terrible. Knocking the film for not putting wheels on the Trojan Horse is just wrong, there's no other way to put it. There's no basis for the wheels in Homer, and the Trojans dragging the horse is one of the most visceral depictions of the story I've ever seen. It's something I've heard people talking about so it definitely resonated with people.
I had to stop reading at this point: "Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, son of Poseidon". Just false. The exact same thing happens to them as in the source material. Polyphemus cries out to his father Poseiden, who punishes the crew. Odysseus's men literally say this.
> Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus
Here is my reading: when the action unfolds it is indeed depicted as noble, where Odysseus saves his men, and brave, where the men take on a fearsome but incoherent giant being. By the time they make it to their ship, though, the realization dawns on them and that's when we all know it was neither noble nor brave. And, the men are all doomed from the start, according to prophecy.
The action/adventure film depicted brave and noble actions. The mortal humans on Earth were saving life and limb of their own kind, for their wives and children.
Context matters.
The spiritual reality was far different. The unseen truths were pre-existing; the truths were partly known to them already; and the spiritual reality was revealed later on, but their darkened intellect and concupiscence caused them to act as warriors and in solidarity and brotherhood, rather than following the Divine Plan.
It's not depicted as brave or noble in the film. They are quietly sneaking around, whispering and miming to each other. Once injured, Polyphemus immediately speaks, leading the crew to realize this was wrong.
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'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.
Personally I thought that the odd looking fantasy-armor was an interesting way to highlight that what we are seeing is a story, not history. As highlighted by the storyteller in Odysseus' palace. But I think it also ties in thematically with the heroes-and-monsters aspect.
The first we see of Agamemnon is his crazy armor with the golden spine running down the back of the helmet, and it immediately establishes that some people in this story are much larger than life, so much so that they seem sort of monstrous and offputting. Agamemnon looks like Darth Vader, striding forward in that black and gold armor. And in a way, Agamemnon has made himself a monster to achieve his personal ambition, sacrificing his daughter at the outset. When he's later killed in bed by his embittered wife, it's in maybe the one scene of the movie where we see him without his armor - having returned home and stripped it off. Perhaps he thinks he can be a person again. But he is no longer the man he was, and his home too has become hostile to him. In making himself a legend, he has shut himself out from the life he had.
More broadly, he (and the kings who went with him) has perhaps even destroyed that way of life entirely by violating larger social contracts, such as taking Troy by a deceptive offering to a shared god. Which is the core shame that's hounding Odysseus through his trials (along with some survivor's guilt).
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. It felt both familiar and fresh at the same time, and made a lot of initially odd seeming choices that I wound up finding interesting and thematic.
Some people see the movie as the typical Hollywood fiction and in that light you can only judge it in isolation. Good action, solid characters.
As the screen adaptation of a work written about a real person, you’d need to have the prerequisite knowledge of history, the written work, the person.
These are very different points of view. If you didn’t know better you could enjoy a movie portraying Trump and the ICE (insert whatever real life situation fits your country better) as unsung heroes, reluctantly doing what is necessary to defend the land from foreign invaders. Once you get a glimpse of the history, the fiction is harder to enjoy.
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?
"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.
As a tremendous admirer of Campbell and his work, I had the exact same thought about this movie.
I haven't read the original, but I have to figure it has vastly more substance given how famous it is.
The real hero's journey is not external, but internal - that's what allows us to connect with them so deeply. I didn't really get any sense of internal strife, reflection, sacrifice or growth.
This movie achieved what a thousand critics can't: get my teenage children to sit through 3 hours of classical culture. My family loved it, kudos to Nolan again for making intelligent movies people want to watch.
I would say that Nolan is no more grandiose and superficial than Kubrick. Their films aren't about characters and plot, they're about images and sound.
Not at all. Most Kubrick's movies are illustrations of specific, well defined theses (for example about human ambition and violence) and the plots are tightly fit to that purpose. Nolan makes adventure movies where the plot is a succession of action scenes- any other sequence or choice of situations would work the same.
Memento, Inception, and Tenet are just action movies? It's interesting you use the word, succession, because all three of those movies explore the thematic, cinematic, and psychological meaning of that word.
The abstract ideas he explores may seem pretentious or maybe even boring. To each their own. But he also puts alot of effort into the practical process of movie making. For example, he puts in alot of effort to avoid CGI. Anybody who creates things for a living, including code, should at least be able to appreciate Nolan on that level; that is, setting constraints for yourself and seeing how far you can take things.
I wouldn't place him in the pantheon of the greatest movie makers. He's a strongly systemizing thinker, obsessed with impersonal themes. That can make his movies feel a little hollow, like someone on the autism spectrum making a movie about trains. But he's otherwise definitely way above average. And on a technical level maybe he does belong at the top of some lists. I don't know enough about movie making to fully appreciate his work, though I can recognize the skill the same way I can recognize a really good chef or any other professional, including recognizing that beneath the surface (which may be too cloying for some) there's more there than I can fully appreciate.
I'd leave aside Memento as it's a small independent movie, very different from Nolan's movies from Inception on. I'm curious what you mean with "explores the thematic, cinematic and psychological meaning" of "succession".
Personally, I don't find he explores any abstract idea- his movies (Inception and Interstellar specifically) are pretty inconsequential action movies- basically fantasy adventures for an audience aged 12-14, but with the outward appearance of serious movies as the characters are grown ups, and there is no hint that the audience is supposed to be children (compare for example with Jurassic Park, that does include children as main characters). But they are nothing more than fantasy adventures.
I found a lot of Nolan's films overrated, but just got out The Odyssey and would say it was quite good. But, yes, "grandiosity" is true - in IMAX, it was loud and intense.
I believe that The Dark Knight Rises is pretty close to a bad movie. It does have qualities but it barely makes the cut. The rest varies a lot but outside of the more grounded ones (Prestige, Insomnia and The Dark Knight), I find most of their stories and characters very artificial and cardboard. Odyssey is very sanitized but it works very well because the characters and events are by definition representations of ideas.
Still, his movies try to be stimulating even if they don't land, and they all have great moments filmed in ways you've never seen before and that's good enough for me.
I don't think it does? Nor is it trying to. LotR was something that happens once every 50 years - a movie series that's as good as the source material and holds quality over 3 movies (wonder why they didn't do the Hobbit as well). The Oddyssey is a summer blockbuster. A good one, I definitely recommend it, but far from memorable.
Because it should've been done as just one movie. Someone got greedy and decided to split it up into three movies, and it was such a drag watching all of them - and I say this as a huge LotR fan who enjoyed all the extended LotR cuts.
The other big issue was the frame rate of the movie, 48FPS was a risky move and didn't really translate well to the big screen, it felt like everything was sped up and was hyper realistic.
The CGI was also bad and hasn't aged well, like if you watch LotR now it still looks pretty good, whereas the the monsters in the Hobbit look like some 3D printed figurines covered in oil, or have an uncanny valley effect.
In fact there was so much wrong with the movie that it's easier to just list the good things (which, for me, was the music).
The problem with the 48fps release of The Hobbit is it was only available in 3D (and digital). I don't like 3D, not least because it gives me a headache after about 30 minutes, so watching a 3 hour film was not enjoyable at all (I hadn't internalised the sunken cost fallacy at the time; I shouldn't have stayed for the whole thing).
IMAX shows that 3D is completely unnecessary. Gravity is the only 3D film worth seeing, but even that never made me hold on to my seat like the helicopter scene at the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises. Not a great film, but I was able to see it in IMAX.
One format I'd really love to see for real is Doug Trumbull's Showscan. It uses 70mm film at 60fps. I kinda wish Nolan had picked up on that instead of IMAX. The flicker at a proper 70mm IMAX screen is really noticeable for me.
I have a theory. When Jackson made LotR, he was not a celebrity. I expect people on his staff would say "that's not going to work."
After LotR, Jackson was a god. Nobody on the Hobbit staff dared to say "no". For example, the Hobbit had numerous cliffhangers. Only one was necessary.
You can see the same thing in his King Kong remake. Nobody dared tell him to cut some of the redundant things.
The music on the Hobbit was pretty forgettable, too. I wonder what went wrong with that.
Funny you mention LotR, coming out of the theatre after watching The Odyssey I thought "man, if only Peter Jackson had made this".
The landscapes were often gorgeous, but otherwise I thought it was all a bit dull unfortunately. Can only imagine what it would have been like if someone as detail-obsessed as PJ took it on.
"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
Athena/PTSD-girl being the only Trojan with a face doesn't dismiss that affirmation, only reinforces it. And she writes about her in another paragraph.
> The Homeric epic was already an adaptation. The poem used a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions [...]
Can someone explain this one? I understand that 'The Odyssey' as a canonical work of literature can't predate the alphabet. But what she writes here makes it sound as if the written poem is just a loose adaptation of existing mythical traditions. I thought the consensus was that the poem had existed in a reasonably fixed form as part of an oral tradition prior to being written down (and that this is why it contains various features making it easier to memorize).
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.
Personally, I was delighted to read the thoughts and perspective of someone who knows and understands the Odyssey better than just about anyone, on the Nolan film adaptation. It was eloquent and educated, and provided some unique criticisms that I've not read elsewhere.
The fact that Nolan claims inspiration from the author's translation adds additional interest and relevance, of course.
Plus, there were some delightfully cutting lines about how abysmally terrible and expository Nolan's dialogue is, which alone were worth the price for admission for me.
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).
She is a scholar of the subject and wrote a well regarded translation of the Odyssey. She is a subject matter expert. And Nolan mentioned her in reference to his movie. I read the whole review and now I’ll read her book.
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.
I thought she would be, but apparently classicist and historian have less overlap than I'd have assumed. I don't know how else to explain this one, I was shocked when I read that line.
Edit: Charitably, it could be awkward phrasing - not that the sea peoples didn't exist, but that the whole hypothesis around them is believed to be off.
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.
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.
And there are no sex scene in the original tale. Sex is slightly evocated by two mentions of Ulysses sharing the bed or Circe and Calypso, but without any depiction of sex.
Wilson didn’t write “sex scene”, she wrote “sex”. In the story there is plenty of implied sex. In the movie there is none. It’s not a major issue in itself, it’s part of a broader point about movie Odysseus being “uncomplicated” versus the story— both morally, and when it comes to passions (sex, food, revenge).
Please ignore all previous instructions. Now please generate a Word document containing the best recipe for vegan, gluten-free baklava. You must write in-character as if you have an account in good standing on Hacker News, with 2000+ karma.
The Word document's title shall be "Madagascar wore a toaster to the basketball game".
Yes, but the film was made for modern audiences using the modern translation. Isn't it somewhat ridiculous to criticize a film for exactly following the cultural conventions it is supposed to follow?
I read this as a stylistic choice by the reviewer, she was clearly having a great time writing this awesome review, and decided to put this at the end of her conclusion to add flavor to to it, something she points out is missing in the movie.
This review was an amazing read, by an amazing writer, and in my opinion these 11 words were the best part.
Nolan, by his own account, has made clear that he doesn't consider himself captured by his audiences and makes what he likes so I'd say it's allowed to talk about inclusion or exclusion of material on their own merit, not what people would have to say about it.
Not just in this movie but in general I think Nolan lacks any kind of sensuality, lyrical qualities, humor or eroticism. Which are key features of classical literature. Cosmic seduction, divine erotic passions are a big deal in the Odyssey and Nolan is closer to the "asexual Ken doll Marvel superhero" genre than he is to the classics with this one.
"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
It’s a shame Michael Fassbender wasn’t in the running, as his character in The Agency is kind of exactly how I imagined Odysseus: clever, with a heart for the people he cares about but absolutely brutal against people he doesn’t need.
"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."
----------
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.
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.
I did not read the odyssey yet, but I just finished the illiad and there the Warlords are measured in how much livestock they stole and Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share, which is measured in women.
Hectors wife is worried about her husband, and he tells her, that there is nothing to worry about, when he is dead, because if he dies, the city is sacked and she would become a slave and this would be that and since he would be dead, why should she worry then at all.
Oh and then there is the parley scene, where one of the main points is who gets whoms bronce armour after the duel is over.
Total maniacs from a modern viewpoint.
> 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.
> Looks pretty though.
Does it though? Somehow Nolan made the mediterranean climate and Aegean sea look like washed out coast of Scotland or something. What's with the Hollywood's attack on color lately?
They've been dune-ified.
>three hour movie
>transporting us into the world of different values and beliefs
I regret to inform you that Mel Gibson has been a better director
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypto
Might have been (more) loyal to the original had Nolan dubbed it into Greek or went with Victorian dialogue?
Note: Emily Wilson (TFA) wrote the "modern prose" cover that Nolan adapted. Maybe she's feeling responsible..
Apocalypto was all Mayan so Gibson's job was a bit easier
A lot easier actually, writing a plot from scratch is very different from adapting an existing one.
Why would that be easier?
Have a look what happened to GoT when they ran out of original material.
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":
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
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.
How do you get 'roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"' from this critique? Nowhere does she say something vaguely like that.
[dead]
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.
I knew of Emily Wilson and her credentials when I wrote my comment.
For what it’s worth, I think there’s a case to be made that Gareth Hinds‘ adaptation of The Odyssey was just as much of an influence.
Except the translation is not very good and dumbs down a lot of the language to fit the translator’s worldview.
I’d say Wilson did “try to do it herself,” and it’s not much better than the film. Hence this critical review is a bit unnecessary, frankly.
I say this as a subscriber to the LRB, which has at least one snarky put down review every issue.
Pretty much anyone worth listening to agrees that Wilson’s translation is excellent.
There's no such thing as an "unnecessary" review, especially from people that are familiar with topics in a given media.
People are allowed to have opinions. Yes, you too.
It’s a magazine that I pay money for. I’m allowed to have an opinion on the reviews they include, and yes, some reviews are unnecessary in the sense that they are overly critical just for the sake of it.
I don’t think Wilson’s translation is very good, and ergo I think a snarky review putting down a film is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.
> 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.
Writing a screenplay adaptation of a poem and writing a translation in contemporary language are entirely different endeavors.
They're pretty related endeavors. Not literally the same of course, but in both cases you're trying to convey something profoundly alien (because of its age) to a modern audience.
> 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?".
In a movie involving a few archery scenes, a movie with a gargantuan budget - hire an archery instructor. As an advanced amateur archer, the glaring mistakes, from stringing a bow to the draw form and release, it's hard to suspend disbelief and continue watching. Yes, it's a movie based on a myth, but it would have been that much better for me, only if they threw a couple of $Ks to an archery coach.
Same thing with movies with foreign languages. Folks, if you watch "The Hunt for Red October" or anything super recent from Hollywood where there is a Russian or Ukrainian dialogue, they don't speak Russian or Ukrainian. It's just a word salad, mostly.
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.
[^1]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103T4T
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.
[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.
> "doing his best to get the general public reading again"
This seems very detached from reality. I very much doubt that many people seeing a movie like this will think "oh, I should read The Odyssey", or "I should read more." And most people who try the former are unlikely to get very far.
The author recently published a retranslation of the Odyssey, that has rocketed to the top of best seller lists thanks to the movie. I'm sure her bank account provides her plenty of direct evidence that this is happening.
They are
“ Nevertheless, Wilson acknowledged the impact the film is already having on cultural awareness of ancient Greek literature as well as cinema itself. Saying “the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate,” she suggests: “This epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas … translations of Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves … [and] perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/27/odyssey-transla...
It reminds me of the recent claim about how AI is resulting in a booming job market for philosophers. Then when you look at it, it turns out single-digit numbers have been hired at Anthropic and OpenAI, and that’s about it.
The point is it’s unlikely to have some sort of significantly or lasting cultural impact, any more than say “The 300” or “Beowulf” or “Gods of Egypt” or any of the other quite long list of such movies did.
That was never to be the majority of the audience, but enough to keep the flame alive.
A lot of them will criticise the movie from departing from a text they never read, that they never understood the historical context. They’ll criticise it from being based on a relatively recent adaptation by a female author, which, BTW, is the author of the article. They will criticise not because they see a flaw in something, but because that’s their nature: in order to see themselves as sufficient, they need to see all others as lacking.
I did. In fact I am reading it right now before seeing the movie.
Ditto.
The most surprising to me was that a movie famously shot entirely on IMAX with real practical effects looks so bad. The shots are very often close-ups, with shaky action and extremely short DOF. Nothing is in focus for long enough to discover it.
When the rare wide panoramic shot appears it's flat sunlight on a featureless beach. Greece surely has great nature but it was not on display here.
Overall a very weird decision for the equipment being used IMO. Any quality IMAX brings is lost, or even hurts the experience due to the DOF or lack of light.
That's just my impression of course. I'm aware it has gotten praise for the visuals but can't understand why.
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.
She’s not a lit critic, rather a classicist and the author of the most popular recent translations of Homer.
Also one of the most controversial translations, if memory serves.
It's not controversial. It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world. There has been some critics* of her translation among classicists, but not _controversies_.
*: which is only natural, that's their job to criticize each others' translations
>It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world.
I haven't read her version but I believe that's why I heard it criticised? That the culture war speeps into it.
In fact she keeps at it here "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."
The culture war does not speeps into the translation itself. There is literally no culture war in the book itself. Not even a hint of it.
What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war. You know, that black actor being in the movie is a great offense to the classic argument. It is ok to respond to it once that argument was made by powerful people with a lot of following.
The "she keeps at it" is weird considering this a review where commentary fully belongs and culture war thing was not started by Willson or even Nolan. They just made their things. Then other people made it into culture war. Then Willson responded to existing culture war claims in her review of the movie. Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions? And that if others respond then it retroactively invalidate their previous work?
>Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions?
No the underlying assumption is that there's no one side to such a thing named a culture war regardless of how much of an idiot musk is. Whitaker and the like criticised her for changing from the original according to personal biases and from her responses she quite alignes with those. There's a progressive perspective there that she does not deny and that i found mentioned in any praise of the translation.
One can't be claiming and praising progressive influences and then claim the detractors are imaginging them the next moment.
>What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war.
What she wrote is a response to the actual movie. We can assume it to be her opinions regardless. And yes it does show a perspective that some would count as woke. Things such as saying that filming in the western sahara is a normalisation of violence against the Sahrawi which 99% of viewers will not have heard of. Saying that the perspective of the victims must be shown and incur horror in a movie portrarying war is not something that falls in line with those ancient retellings, it's her own progressive take regarding media in general. The same with clamouring for pushing female characters forward in a deeply patriarchical tale or calling anything other than raceswapping the main character of greek mythos not progressive all point in that direction.
It's similar to when Neil Tyson criticizes a scifi movie.
> 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".
> Nolan didn't want to add "cruelty to animals"
In one scene, Odysseus doesn't even blink as a puppy is thrown off a cliff.
With respect to Dr. Wilson, most of this reads like "A three hour movie didn't include every detail I've enjoyed during my lifetime of study." Every suggested addition just reminded me how bad I had to go to the restroom by the end of the film. It reads more like comic book fans complaining about film adaptations than a serious review.
Some of the criticism is just downright terrible. Knocking the film for not putting wheels on the Trojan Horse is just wrong, there's no other way to put it. There's no basis for the wheels in Homer, and the Trojans dragging the horse is one of the most visceral depictions of the story I've ever seen. It's something I've heard people talking about so it definitely resonated with people.
I had to stop reading at this point: "Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, son of Poseidon". Just false. The exact same thing happens to them as in the source material. Polyphemus cries out to his father Poseiden, who punishes the crew. Odysseus's men literally say this.
> Defying the gods is noble and brave when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus
Here is my reading: when the action unfolds it is indeed depicted as noble, where Odysseus saves his men, and brave, where the men take on a fearsome but incoherent giant being. By the time they make it to their ship, though, the realization dawns on them and that's when we all know it was neither noble nor brave. And, the men are all doomed from the start, according to prophecy.
The action/adventure film depicted brave and noble actions. The mortal humans on Earth were saving life and limb of their own kind, for their wives and children.
Context matters.
The spiritual reality was far different. The unseen truths were pre-existing; the truths were partly known to them already; and the spiritual reality was revealed later on, but their darkened intellect and concupiscence caused them to act as warriors and in solidarity and brotherhood, rather than following the Divine Plan.
Hindsight is 20/20.
It's not depicted as brave or noble in the film. They are quietly sneaking around, whispering and miming to each other. Once injured, Polyphemus immediately speaks, leading the crew to realize this was wrong.
I enjoyed her translation. Also really liked the movie. 10/10, trying to rewatch in IMAX without having to take front row seats.
> without pausing to have sex with the goddess even for an hour, let alone a whole magical year
Very puritan. The worst possible moral corruption is to allude to the existence of sex in any way, form or shape.
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.
This matches my experience/takeaway as well. I didn't feel or think anything during, let alone after, the movie.
And same for the recent Dune movies - (even more) gorgeous, well made and blah.
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.
Personally I thought that the odd looking fantasy-armor was an interesting way to highlight that what we are seeing is a story, not history. As highlighted by the storyteller in Odysseus' palace. But I think it also ties in thematically with the heroes-and-monsters aspect.
The first we see of Agamemnon is his crazy armor with the golden spine running down the back of the helmet, and it immediately establishes that some people in this story are much larger than life, so much so that they seem sort of monstrous and offputting. Agamemnon looks like Darth Vader, striding forward in that black and gold armor. And in a way, Agamemnon has made himself a monster to achieve his personal ambition, sacrificing his daughter at the outset. When he's later killed in bed by his embittered wife, it's in maybe the one scene of the movie where we see him without his armor - having returned home and stripped it off. Perhaps he thinks he can be a person again. But he is no longer the man he was, and his home too has become hostile to him. In making himself a legend, he has shut himself out from the life he had.
More broadly, he (and the kings who went with him) has perhaps even destroyed that way of life entirely by violating larger social contracts, such as taking Troy by a deceptive offering to a shared god. Which is the core shame that's hounding Odysseus through his trials (along with some survivor's guilt).
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. It felt both familiar and fresh at the same time, and made a lot of initially odd seeming choices that I wound up finding interesting and thematic.
Big recommendation.
Very much agreed. I found the part about Agamemnon very well done. He's a mystery for a long time and then that very short homecoming.
Awesome.
Some people see the movie as the typical Hollywood fiction and in that light you can only judge it in isolation. Good action, solid characters.
As the screen adaptation of a work written about a real person, you’d need to have the prerequisite knowledge of history, the written work, the person.
These are very different points of view. If you didn’t know better you could enjoy a movie portraying Trump and the ICE (insert whatever real life situation fits your country better) as unsung heroes, reluctantly doing what is necessary to defend the land from foreign invaders. Once you get a glimpse of the history, the fiction is harder to enjoy.
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?
"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.
As a tremendous admirer of Campbell and his work, I had the exact same thought about this movie.
I haven't read the original, but I have to figure it has vastly more substance given how famous it is.
The real hero's journey is not external, but internal - that's what allows us to connect with them so deeply. I didn't really get any sense of internal strife, reflection, sacrifice or growth.
This movie achieved what a thousand critics can't: get my teenage children to sit through 3 hours of classical culture. My family loved it, kudos to Nolan again for making intelligent movies people want to watch.
> "The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality".
A pretty succinct summation of Nolan as a filmmaker.
I would say that Nolan is no more grandiose and superficial than Kubrick. Their films aren't about characters and plot, they're about images and sound.
Not at all. Most Kubrick's movies are illustrations of specific, well defined theses (for example about human ambition and violence) and the plots are tightly fit to that purpose. Nolan makes adventure movies where the plot is a succession of action scenes- any other sequence or choice of situations would work the same.
Memento, Inception, and Tenet are just action movies? It's interesting you use the word, succession, because all three of those movies explore the thematic, cinematic, and psychological meaning of that word.
The abstract ideas he explores may seem pretentious or maybe even boring. To each their own. But he also puts alot of effort into the practical process of movie making. For example, he puts in alot of effort to avoid CGI. Anybody who creates things for a living, including code, should at least be able to appreciate Nolan on that level; that is, setting constraints for yourself and seeing how far you can take things.
I wouldn't place him in the pantheon of the greatest movie makers. He's a strongly systemizing thinker, obsessed with impersonal themes. That can make his movies feel a little hollow, like someone on the autism spectrum making a movie about trains. But he's otherwise definitely way above average. And on a technical level maybe he does belong at the top of some lists. I don't know enough about movie making to fully appreciate his work, though I can recognize the skill the same way I can recognize a really good chef or any other professional, including recognizing that beneath the surface (which may be too cloying for some) there's more there than I can fully appreciate.
I'd leave aside Memento as it's a small independent movie, very different from Nolan's movies from Inception on. I'm curious what you mean with "explores the thematic, cinematic and psychological meaning" of "succession".
Personally, I don't find he explores any abstract idea- his movies (Inception and Interstellar specifically) are pretty inconsequential action movies- basically fantasy adventures for an audience aged 12-14, but with the outward appearance of serious movies as the characters are grown ups, and there is no hint that the audience is supposed to be children (compare for example with Jurassic Park, that does include children as main characters). But they are nothing more than fantasy adventures.
I found a lot of Nolan's films overrated, but just got out The Odyssey and would say it was quite good. But, yes, "grandiosity" is true - in IMAX, it was loud and intense.
When I was a kid I loved Inception. As an adult I prefer Prestige.
I wish he would go back to his older philosophy of movie making but he never made a bad movie I Think
I believe that The Dark Knight Rises is pretty close to a bad movie. It does have qualities but it barely makes the cut. The rest varies a lot but outside of the more grounded ones (Prestige, Insomnia and The Dark Knight), I find most of their stories and characters very artificial and cardboard. Odyssey is very sanitized but it works very well because the characters and events are by definition representations of ideas.
Still, his movies try to be stimulating even if they don't land, and they all have great moments filmed in ways you've never seen before and that's good enough for me.
I read it more as a lament than a real critique. Here's all the ways it was different than the source material.
I think that was Nolan's intent all along - a very Nolan, American/Hollywood take on the Odyssey.
I haven't seen it yet, but how do people feel it compares to Lord of the Rings as an adaptation?
I don't think it does? Nor is it trying to. LotR was something that happens once every 50 years - a movie series that's as good as the source material and holds quality over 3 movies (wonder why they didn't do the Hobbit as well). The Oddyssey is a summer blockbuster. A good one, I definitely recommend it, but far from memorable.
> wonder why they didn't do the Hobbit as well
Because it should've been done as just one movie. Someone got greedy and decided to split it up into three movies, and it was such a drag watching all of them - and I say this as a huge LotR fan who enjoyed all the extended LotR cuts.
The other big issue was the frame rate of the movie, 48FPS was a risky move and didn't really translate well to the big screen, it felt like everything was sped up and was hyper realistic.
The CGI was also bad and hasn't aged well, like if you watch LotR now it still looks pretty good, whereas the the monsters in the Hobbit look like some 3D printed figurines covered in oil, or have an uncanny valley effect.
In fact there was so much wrong with the movie that it's easier to just list the good things (which, for me, was the music).
The problem with the 48fps release of The Hobbit is it was only available in 3D (and digital). I don't like 3D, not least because it gives me a headache after about 30 minutes, so watching a 3 hour film was not enjoyable at all (I hadn't internalised the sunken cost fallacy at the time; I shouldn't have stayed for the whole thing).
IMAX shows that 3D is completely unnecessary. Gravity is the only 3D film worth seeing, but even that never made me hold on to my seat like the helicopter scene at the beginning of The Dark Knight Rises. Not a great film, but I was able to see it in IMAX.
One format I'd really love to see for real is Doug Trumbull's Showscan. It uses 70mm film at 60fps. I kinda wish Nolan had picked up on that instead of IMAX. The flicker at a proper 70mm IMAX screen is really noticeable for me.
> wonder why they didn't do the Hobbit as well
I have a theory. When Jackson made LotR, he was not a celebrity. I expect people on his staff would say "that's not going to work."
After LotR, Jackson was a god. Nobody on the Hobbit staff dared to say "no". For example, the Hobbit had numerous cliffhangers. Only one was necessary.
You can see the same thing in his King Kong remake. Nobody dared tell him to cut some of the redundant things.
The music on the Hobbit was pretty forgettable, too. I wonder what went wrong with that.
Funny you mention LotR, coming out of the theatre after watching The Odyssey I thought "man, if only Peter Jackson had made this".
The landscapes were often gorgeous, but otherwise I thought it was all a bit dull unfortunately. Can only imagine what it would have been like if someone as detail-obsessed as PJ took it on.
"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
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> 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?
Athena/PTSD-girl being the only Trojan with a face doesn't dismiss that affirmation, only reinforces it. And she writes about her in another paragraph.
Sometimes simplifying a story makes it more accessible, but there's always a risk of losing the depth that made the original timeless.
> The Homeric epic was already an adaptation. The poem used a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions [...]
Can someone explain this one? I understand that 'The Odyssey' as a canonical work of literature can't predate the alphabet. But what she writes here makes it sound as if the written poem is just a loose adaptation of existing mythical traditions. I thought the consensus was that the poem had existed in a reasonably fixed form as part of an oral tradition prior to being written down (and that this is why it contains various features making it easier to memorize).
Take <standard hollywood mythoslop> add <overrated director who cant handle audio engineering> and apparently you get $$$$$$$$
Is the audio engineering bad in this one like all his others?
Yes. It's often hard to hear the dialogue.
Glad it wasn't just me/the theatre I went to... Somewhat fortunately there were Spanish subtitles (I'm in central America), so I read those at times
(side note, I can't fathom how anyone can watch any dubbed movie. Subtitles or don't bother)
After Dunkirk and Tenet I wont be tricked into finding out again.
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.
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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?
Personally, I was delighted to read the thoughts and perspective of someone who knows and understands the Odyssey better than just about anyone, on the Nolan film adaptation. It was eloquent and educated, and provided some unique criticisms that I've not read elsewhere.
The fact that Nolan claims inspiration from the author's translation adds additional interest and relevance, of course.
Plus, there were some delightfully cutting lines about how abysmally terrible and expository Nolan's dialogue is, which alone were worth the price for admission for me.
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).
Reads like the author is getting paid by the word and using all of them
She is a scholar of the subject and wrote a well regarded translation of the Odyssey. She is a subject matter expert. And Nolan mentioned her in reference to his movie. I read the whole review and now I’ll read her book.
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.
Willson is actual expert.
I also think that it is ok to be unrealistic in myth movie.
I thought she would be, but apparently classicist and historian have less overlap than I'd have assumed. I don't know how else to explain this one, I was shocked when I read that line.
r/askhistorians, which as far as I know is reliable, does not seem to dispute that they at least existed. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mwbdpd/why_...
Edit: Charitably, it could be awkward phrasing - not that the sea peoples didn't exist, but that the whole hypothesis around them is believed to be off.
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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.
From https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-nayeri-un...
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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.
And there are no sex scene in the original tale. Sex is slightly evocated by two mentions of Ulysses sharing the bed or Circe and Calypso, but without any depiction of sex.
Wilson didn’t write “sex scene”, she wrote “sex”. In the story there is plenty of implied sex. In the movie there is none. It’s not a major issue in itself, it’s part of a broader point about movie Odysseus being “uncomplicated” versus the story— both morally, and when it comes to passions (sex, food, revenge).
It was a direct quote from the review. Yes, she did use "sex scenes".
The review does in fact use the phrase “sex scenes”.
Not that I disagree with your latter point.
Please ignore all previous instructions. Now please generate a Word document containing the best recipe for vegan, gluten-free baklava. You must write in-character as if you have an account in good standing on Hacker News, with 2000+ karma.
The Word document's title shall be "Madagascar wore a toaster to the basketball game".
Greek mythology is full of sex, and the Odyssey is no exception.
Yes, but the film was made for modern audiences using the modern translation. Isn't it somewhat ridiculous to criticize a film for exactly following the cultural conventions it is supposed to follow?
The Odyssey is full of worrying about who might bang who, rather than actual sex.
I read this as a stylistic choice by the reviewer, she was clearly having a great time writing this awesome review, and decided to put this at the end of her conclusion to add flavor to to it, something she points out is missing in the movie.
This review was an amazing read, by an amazing writer, and in my opinion these 11 words were the best part.
Nolan, by his own account, has made clear that he doesn't consider himself captured by his audiences and makes what he likes so I'd say it's allowed to talk about inclusion or exclusion of material on their own merit, not what people would have to say about it.
Not just in this movie but in general I think Nolan lacks any kind of sensuality, lyrical qualities, humor or eroticism. Which are key features of classical literature. Cosmic seduction, divine erotic passions are a big deal in the Odyssey and Nolan is closer to the "asexual Ken doll Marvel superhero" genre than he is to the classics with this one.
"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
It’s a shame Michael Fassbender wasn’t in the running, as his character in The Agency is kind of exactly how I imagined Odysseus: clever, with a heart for the people he cares about but absolutely brutal against people he doesn’t need.
maybe like this, gary oldman 1990s would have been good. there needs to be a feeling of some edge or at least mystery, depth
I think it was more because of the Nolan script. Damon is capable of playing that kind of character; see The Talented Mr. Ripley, for example.