An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan
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Odysseus, in the poem, is a bit of a monster by modern standards. He's intemperate, devious, unfaithful, greedy, and excessively violent in all the very human ways that modern Hollywood heroes aren't. Homeric Greeks were basically pirates, and not the Hollywood kind either! One of the epithets commonly applied to Odysseus in the poems is "sacker of cities", and that's in a very literal sense.
Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get into the mental space of the bronze age Achaeans. In a three hour movie that's a lot harder to do.
And this is the strongest criticism of this movie - Nolan took the easy way out of just shoving the story in 21st century America instead of doing the work of transporting us into the world of different values and beliefs. It's an easy snack for infantilised audience who isn't trusted to actually engage into something that steps out of their locally cultural space.
It's about the most damning thing about this movie.
Looks pretty though.
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?
>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
Have a look what happened to GoT when they ran out of original material.
"... 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.
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.
The only logical approach IMO is to judge it from within its own context.
"And tall Hector nodded, his helmet flashing: “All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman. But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy and the Trojan women trailing their long robes if I would shrink from battle now, a coward. Nor does the spirit urge me on that way. I've learned it all too well. To stand up bravely, always to fight in the front ranks of Trojan soldiers, winning my father great glory, glory for myself. For in my heart and soul I also know this well: the day will come when sacred Troy must die, Priam must die and all his people with him, Priam who hurls the strong ash spear . . . Even so, it is less the pain of the Trojans still to come that weighs me down, not even of Hecuba herself or King Priam, or the thought that my own brothers in all their numbers, all their gallant courage, may tumble in the dust, crushed by enemies — That is nothing, nothing beside your agony when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears, wrenching away your day of light and freedom! Then far off in the land of Argos you must live, laboring at a loom, at another woman's beck and call, fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia, resisting it all the way — the rough yoke of necessity at your neck. And a man may say, who sees you streaming tears, 'There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter they could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans, long ago when the men fought for Troy.' So he will say and the fresh grief will swell your heart once more, widowed, robbed of the one man strong enough to fight off your day of slavery. No, no, let the earth come piling over my dead body before I hear your cries, I hear you dragged away!”"
> Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share
He's mad because he is camped out on a beach for a decade helping Agamemnon, which he has no obligation to do, and Agamemnon steals his sex slave for little reason and tells him to fuck off. Achilles then refuses to war for this guy, very reasonably.
I think you must have skimmed this book very rapidly because you seem to not understand what you read.
In the passage you cited he does not say that he is fighting for her; he is fighting for his honor, the glory of his father. Everything else he states are consequences. He doesn't reassure her, he offers her fate rather than hope.
> He's mad because he is camped out on a beach for a decade helping Agamemnon, which he has no obligation to do, and Agamemnon steals his sex slave for little reason and tells him to fuck off. Achilles then refuses to war for this guy, very reasonably.
Reasonable if your point in going to war is for riches; they are just a bunch of pirates and bandits, thats my point. Before the Illiad I had the idea of the noble greecs in their shining bronce armour. That was my misconception to be fair. So this was something that got me from the start. The only thing that seems to outweight riches is glory, it seems.
So my reading of the whole thing is, and please correct me if I misunderstood it , that the man fighting these wars are total manicas, they fight for glory, and women and tripods. They choose the best and wised of man (Nestor) on how good a cattle thief he is - ok not entirely he is also valued for his age and eloquence, but he got there beeing a pretty good cattle thief. They plunder the land and destroy everything around it and themselves. And I think the Illiad backs this up...
Reacting to the article and not OP here, also spoilers:
I'm sorry, I know the movie was long, but did OP miss the Bronze-age Darth Vader with bones on his head? The very classic Nolan ending twist that Athena was a PTSD hallucination of the Trojan woman they killed? The constant and obvious murdering and pillaging that Odysseus and his crew do? That the Trojans were wearing white and the Greeks were wearing black? The very obvious scene where all the people that they have killed tell Odysseus that he is a bad guy and then they all go running after him and the crew?
Like, to me, I felt that it was over-the-top obvious, almost embarrassingly so from such a director, that the Greeks were the bad guys. He could not have communicated that more or better to my eyes. He comes out and says so at the ~90% mark. It is very clear.
But, and I apologize if I am also guilty of this sin with the article, it seems that he does not even still do enough to communicate that to many viewers.
In modern times this is a common trope, that solders and military commanders do not have to face any consequences for their crimes as long as they say they feel bad about it, and as long as they were fighting for our team (see recent episode about Graham Platner). No focus on the victims, no focus on criminal justice against the protagonist, just repent and you shall be forgiven.
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.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.
People are allowed to have opinions. Yes, you too.
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.
Furthermore, it's simply not true. Lattimore is generally considered to be the most authentic translation. There are plenty of criticisms of the Wilson translation that aren't culture war complaints. You seem to have the impression that they are, which is factually wrong.
If you don't care about authenticity, well, the Wilson one doesn't win any aesthetic awards either. It translates polytropos, a notoriously complex and multi-faceted word, as complicated.
There are hundreds of such examples. Lattimore translates one line as "Troy's sacred citadel," whereas Wilson chooses "Holy town of Troy." It's dumbed down and artless.
And we haven't even gotten to the ideological choices of certain word translations, but I won't get to that here.
Rest assured that she’s given more thought to every single word in that poem than almost anyone else alive.
Wilson’s translation is in my reading queue before I see the film, but whether I like it or not is completely irrelevant to the quality of the work, which is best assessed by the folks who actually study this stuff for a living.
I see nothing tangible in your comment other than “I think it’s artless and dumb,” which is not as convincing as you seem to think.
If you actually spend some time looking into scholarly discussion of the translation... it's seen as quite deficient and indeed cuts out a lot of meaning in the original Greek.
Just give this a cursory scroll, for example:
https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf
But you don't even need to do that. Just get a PDF of Fagles or Lattimore and compare lines word for word to Wilson.
And if you don't have an opinion yourself, and I'm guessing you haven't read any other translation, or perhaps even Wilsons? Which means you're just arguing with me because what... some culture war thing? There is such a weird obsession with defending this translation, ostensibly from people that haven't even read it or other translations. So absurd.
Compare the opening lines:
Fagles:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
The Fagles translation is much more lyrical without being overly pompous or florid, and the McKellen audio version (which is the way the story was first told, right?) is delightful. Reading along as McKellen tells the story is a joy.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/16/a-voyage-of-di...
If anything, this emphasizes that no single translation will be the definitive one. (And to call Wilson’s “artless” is quite a stretch.)
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.
It seems like most people can still understand, "I didn't care for it." Even if sometimes even that's too much to bear.
But I've observed that the expansion into, "I noticed some problems, and I'll articulate them" seems to get bluntly polarized into something much less generous.
"I'd like to see you do better" is a run of the mill response to criticism. Which overall demonstrates a lack of maturity / confidence in ones own taste.
For the record, I loved the movie. I thought some parts were odd. I found this piece interesting.
It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.
This feels like a pretty shallow take on a what seemed to me like a pretty in depth and interesting review. Clearly there's a huge amount of potential ground that could have been covered in a film like this, so a critical look at what was and wasn't included, the angles that were chosen, the parts that were glossed over etc. can be revealing. Put another way, I think the review is a pretty in depth look at the questions "what was the artist trying to achieve?" and "Did they succeed?".
Counterpoint to your view on critics. A discerning audience is equally as important to a thriving culture as artists. If critics just clap their hands whenever someone tries to make something, granting that making a bad work of art is often just as difficult as making a good one, we get junk. I don't see why the perspective of the maker is relevant at all.
“You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.” - Pauline Kael
"What was the artist trying to achieve?"
How is that "disarmingly straightforward"? Does that mean it's a straightforward question for anyone to answer because it's obvious, or that it's straightforward for the viewer of the art because in that case the answer could be anything? If the former, that's an incredibly difficult question to answer and kind of nullifies the point of this entire exercise.
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.
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.
Just to be clear. This is the same director who interpreted Occupy Wall Street as Batman’s Bane.
I don‘t dispute his talent, but this talent of his speaks to conservative, pro-establishment, values. If you don‘t share his conservative values, it is very easy to see how his interpretations are at complete odds with contemporary textures and preoccupations.
I find this (Nolan as conservative; Bane as Occupy) interpretation a bit tired, to be honest. It’s often repeated but I think it has aged badly.
Bane has ‘Occupy Wall Street’ elements for sure. But he’s also a strongman - visually, he’s a steroid populist. He doesn’t look like an Occupy guy at all. He looks like he should be on Rogan talking about MMA.
Isn’t the much more apt reading of the image in 2026 - ignoring Nolan’s intention, for a moment - that Bane is the face of what happens when the institutional mistrust of the Occupy movement (a trait that is not specifically left wing or right wing) goes ignored, festers, and musters behind basically whoever is loudest?
Bane is even pitted against an explicitly deep state-like surveillance apparatus run by Batman-as-Palantir.
It feels much more prescient to me of Trumpian chaos-populism (whose efficacy lies in its absorption of traditionally leftist sentiments and demographics) than it has been given credit for.
Neither Batman nor Bane (nor the failing state) is shown as good or ideal by Nolan, and Nolan doesn’t speak about his personal politics. Oppenheimer was about how observation and time changes interpretation - specifically the meaning of an individual’s politics when they are observed.
I guess you could argue that refusing to state a position renders you de-facto conservative, as it implies satisfaction with the status quo - but maybe Nolan is simply requesting more nuance from the observers of his work than interpreting it based on the author’s politics would allow.
> 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.
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.
“ 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...
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2025526/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov...
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.
*: which is only natural, that's their job to criticize each others' translations
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."
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?
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.
That part she wrote there was response to the outrage Musk was creating. It is clearly said in the text and you need a whole dose of bad faith to pretend it is reaction to the movie only. And that outrage is about casting and wish for white only movies, everything else is an insult to people like him.
> 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.
By pushing you mean "not suppressing". Fun fact: deeply patriarchal societies do in fact use female characters and write about women. I know, because I read old books. The need to not have them in stories is specific to just some patriarchal societies. The need to write them out of history and out of old books is also specific to certain patriarchal wanna be branches.
I was referencing the text as a whole with more varied examples there including the bit about making the main character black.
>And that outrage is about casting and wish for white only movies, everything else is an insult to people like him.
Honestly I think an movie on asian mythology or medieval china or japan with american demographic inserts would draw criticism as well. And there's a reason we don't see it in the woman king or the like (which twists extremely in other ways some may deem progressive or woke)
>By pushing you mean "not suppressing". Fun fact: deeply patriarchal societies do in fact use female characters and write about women.
Yes they do. It's right there in the odessey. What was written out of the movie for example? Most of the maidservants being killed on oddyseus's return because of their disloyalty because Nolan said it was misogynistic. And in that bit about the backwards archaic values Emily points it out herself how to make it less 'backwards' nolan distorts the story without mending it in a sensible way. Beyond that he condenses in a way that doesn't favour focusing on these individual women (and various other characters which she cares less about) in a way that Emily would like according to her sensibilities. Same with not ommiting other bits so he can lay bare and focus on the victims of war rather makign them just opponents to the protagonist.
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.
IIRC there was a lot of bokeh which seemed to me like an artistic choice.
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.
Awesome.
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.
Stretching credulity a bit there.
I read a couple comments from an extra who had worn the same costume in at least 2 other films.
Between that, the Viking Longboat and the name brand actors falling out of every hole, my instinct is that he was asked to tune the film for a very particular budget/advertising campaign and had little to work with outside of that.
Its like, yes you can film here, here and here, and have weird custom shit here, but these actors will fill seats for marketing so you need to pay them, and then make do with whatever money is left.
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?
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".
In one scene, Odysseus doesn't even blink as a puppy is thrown off a cliff.
And same for the recent Dune movies - (even more) gorgeous, well made and blah.
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.
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.
A pretty succinct summation of Nolan as a filmmaker.
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.
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.
Michael Bay is much more an action filmmaker than Nolan, and yet he also arguably has a much better feel for satiating people emotionally than Nolan. For the most part both make movies with greater appeal to men, but Nolan's more intellectual approach comes closer to being of cross-gender interest, IMO.
I wouldn't call Nolan's movies fantasy at all. At their core they're pure sci-fi, more than most sci-fi films. He starts with some curious bit of science (biology, physics, etc), rigorously maps out a story that sticks close to the science except for a single conceit, and builds a blockbuster around it with a dramatic structure that serves the exploration of the technical details more than the human drama. But Nolan has a unique style, and he's also clearly pursuing some very technical interests wrt movie making at least as much as the details of the story. So his movies are difficult to categorize beyond being, for most of his career, blockbuster-scale action flicks, for which he also has an excellent aptitude, which is still a skill, notwithstanding that it's considered crass.
Without having seen Odyssey, I assume it follows his same formula, except the core technical theme follows some obscure question (even to scholars) of culture or storytelling, a thread much more difficult to identify and follow because it more easily blends into the background (and foreground?), both for average viewers and Odyssey buffs alike.
I wish he would go back to his older philosophy of movie making but he never made a bad movie I Think
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.
Is an evergreen take on Nolan's movies for me.
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 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.
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 story is from the 12th century BCE Mycenaean Greece. I think most scholars agree some of the people actually existed, and that some of the events did indeed take place. It was then told mouth to mouth for the next 6 centuries, as in the late Bronze age collapse the Greek culture lost their alphabet and couldn’t write it down.
In the 8th century BCE Homer composed the epic from these stories. The Greek culture had just adopted a new alphabet and his poems were written down relatively quickly after it was composed. Having an alphabet to write down the composition gives you a certain freedom when composing, as you don‘t have to compose in a way that every word will be recalled from memory (compare this to e.g. the poetic Eddas which didn’t have this luxury; and also the Prose Edda which did).
The singer/performer (in Homer’s time there were special bards specifically of Homer’s texts called rhapsodes) would use these formulae to help them construct the flow and meter of the overall poem while rendering. So they basically knew the formulae by heart, knew the general plot outline, and had enough cultural and other vocabulary to be able to reconstruct a long text in a single sitting from memory.
This means that most of the time, every performance was unique, and small details were continually added and altered by every rhapsode / performer. Hence, while the outline remained fairly known, the details have naturally shifted over the years. Hence the mountains of inconsistencies with for instance armour, customs, etc. Even though the story is set in the Bronze age, most dress and probably some of the cultural aspects in general is a mix of stuff contemporary to the time of writing and stuff the Greeks may have thought seemed old to them.
It was, by and large, more important to remember the overall details about what the key characters do than it was to remember what they wore for centuries on. For the purposes of plot, armour is armour after all. (Incidentally, this is why the description of Achiles’ shield in the Illiad is such an interesting example.)
Given all of this, today it’s generally accepted that "Homer" was not a singular poet of tremendous gifts who bequeathed the world two immense poems, but rather a name for a collective author. This hypothesis was borne out by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord in their research in Yugoslavian oral poetry in the early XX century, where they found living examples of singers able to, in several sittings, render some 12k+ verses from memory.
This is by no means unique, and similarities have since been found across cultures, though, perhaps, not to that extent. Blues is, for example, full of constant epithets and other formulae that make constructing and reconstructing songs or indeed improvising them in a call-and-response manner much easier. As long as you have the cultural cachet and knowledge of the building blocks, that is.
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.
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.
(side note, I can't fathom how anyone can watch any dubbed movie. Subtitles or don't bother)
Agree about dubbing.
Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition to the plotline, as unrealistic as it is.
I also think that it is ok to be unrealistic in myth movie.
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.
* It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea. Did anyone outside of this group mention the People From the Sea? Was anyone outside of the group anticipating, terrified, or already terrorized by some other group?
* Ithaca is an island kingdom; anyone who lives there is a sailor by experience, and all of Greece is a region of islands and archipelagos
* Odysseus and his crew had not seen them or found them, because they are not sufficiently self-aware or spiritual
* They violated the Law of Zeus. All of them.
* That's why the Trojan Horse didn't have wheels. It was terrible to drag across dry land, but it was made of buoyant wood. It was a seahorse.
* Everyone they met, from the Trojans to Circe to Calypso and the Cyclopes, obesrved them to approach from the sea, land on the shore, and leave the same way
* They (Odysseus and his family) ultimately attacked Ithaca (the suitors)
* Odysseus, his wife and son go into exile by boat, and sail west, [beyond Gibraltar], thus permanently becoming People Of The Sea
* The Odyssey is a myth, fiction, legendary, and none of its characters actually existed
* The People From the Sea are not mentioned in Homer's text. They're extra-canonical. They were hypothesized, starting in the 19th century.
The term "Sea People" or "People of the Sea" has been taken from Egyptian documents that described a series of battles for defending Egypt against them.
Egypt succeeded to repel them, but other regions were not so lucky, because around the same time a lot of cities were destroyed. Because of the coincidence in time, it is assumed that the Egyptians have fought against the same people who destroyed the other cities.
There are also documents from Ugarit, written immediately before that city was destroyed, which requested help because they expected an imminent attack, but it was too late and the city was destroyed before receiving any help.
The documents do not contain enough information to identify who were the attackers, but there is no doubt that attacks existed and they destroyed many cities in Greece, Crete, Anatolia and in the territory of modern Syria.
It is not known who the "sea people" were, e.g. whether they were invaders coming from far away or they were just some poorer local populations that had revolted in a time of famine, but what is known for sure is that a lot of cities around the Eastern Mediterranean have been destroyed and burned during several decades, and this has resulted in the disappearance of several centralized kingdoms, leaving only a few surviving big states, i.e. Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, while everywhere else no central authorities remained and the territories were fragmented into small independent parts, consisting mostly of a city and its neighborhoods.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...
Edit: It occured to me, perhaps Wilson is thinking about this subject primarily from the Greek perspective, when most of what we know comes from others.
That sounds a lot like what Wilson is implying.
I think that was Nolan's intent all along - a very Nolan, American/Hollywood take on the Odyssey.
Very puritan. The worst possible moral corruption is to allude to the existence of sex in any way, form or shape.
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 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.
Not that you need knowledge of the original to plainly see that there was no depth to the movie, in any regard. I felt and thought nothing during it, let alone after. That's the definition of not Artful.
Moreover, it vindicates Homer and makes me want to read the original (which I apparently had bought on audiobook ages ago and never listened to. At 12 hours, I expect to finish in the coming weeks).
This review, like a few other reviews that I have seen, concludes that Nolan's Odyssey is not a bad movie, it is not boring and it has some spectacular scenes, so it may be worth viewing, but it definitely is not Homer's Odyssey at all.
I always dislike when American movies take the name from some classic work of literature, but then they change the story completely and frequently even contradictory to the original.
Nolan had a story that he wanted to show, which did not match any Ancient Greek story, and he should have better done this without calling it "The Odyssey", which creates false expectations, though an unknown name might have generated less publicity and it might have tempted less people to see what it is about.
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.
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).
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.
FWIW, I get this too, but it's not actually because of the 3D effect, it's just because I have a big head and the glasses at theatres press on the side of my head, giving me a headache.
Is it? I loved LOTR during my first watch, then many years later actually read the books and tried watching it again. Many of the changes that Jackson made in service of commercial, mass-market appeal were downright silly, if not cringe-worthy, to the point where I actually had to stop my rewatch after the first film.
The films don’t hold a candle to the books, though I appreciate that they got me into LOTR in the first place.
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.
> 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?
It's almost as if a work entitled "Oppenheimer" is not supposed to be a character study of this American scientist during the war named Oppenheimer.
Juuusttt maaayyybeee, an adaptation of The Odyssey is mostly gonna be about Odysseus and his side of the war, and that's when Troy gets narratively involved. TFA justifies this criticism with a polemic about what a "serious depiction of violence" is supposed to include but doesn't pause to consider that maybe that is not the film's point. Even the source material isn't about the Trojan War---there's another epic prequel for that! Not to mention Virgil's sequel.
She also says, in the same paragraph, that the "Homeric poems easily clear the bar". Sure! The other Homeric poem---the one not the subject of this adaptation---did that.
I'm not saying these are not themes worth exploring just that maybe it is not a mistake that it wasn't included here. Not an oversight, but intentional. Maybe a work of fiction is supposed to have biases (gasp!) and that is just fine.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Had Nolan involved the Trojans beyond Zendaya's character we'd be hearing criticism along the lines of the film being "thematically incoherent", "could've had a more focused treatment, easily shaving off twenty minutes to its already unforgiving runtime".
> 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...
Hey, she forgot to include O Brother, Where Art Thou!
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> 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.
This review was an amazing read, by an amazing writer, and in my opinion these 11 words were the best part.
Not that I disagree with your latter point.
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.
Polytropos means: a man of many twists and turns, describing simultaneously a person who has traveled widely and been "turned" by many hardships and places, as well as someone whose mind is clever, resourceful, versatile, and cunning enough to turn any situation to their advantage
Or as W2 academics chasing book reviews and podcasts slots translate: "a complicated guy"
the perfect actor would be someone with james bond spy thriller feeling not commercial guy that has the energy of a little league coach
Wilson chose to prioritize making the translation uncomplicated and metrical the way it would have been to the original audience instead of trying to capture the full meaning of every single word. No other translation has done that before. They either aren't in meter or they torture the English language into strange and complicated grammar that has a very different effect on the audience than the original would have.
If you want different tradeoffs, then there are countless other translations to choose from. There would be no point writing a new translation if you aren't going to choose different tradeoffs.