Seb's Web

A few points about The Odyssey, though I know I’m a bit late on this…

The Odyssey has quite a few qualities going for it, sure, but there has been a lot of talk surrounding it and some pundits got it right. There are genuine issues with it, from the changes made to the original material to the story-telling and the dialogue… I mean just to name a few things:

• The choices for the armour were quite odd and felt very much out of place for a story set in the late Bronze age. For anyone even remotely familiar with the subject, the Iron Age weapons, the armour and, among other things, the usage of war chariots, will surely feel anachronistic.
• What also baffled me was the pacing of the story. It’s not a bad choice to start in media res, but starting this way should be a way of hooking you in, not to then meander through low-stakes side-quests before actually getting to our hero’s story…
• And that story’s not great either. From a beautiful, sprawling and fluid narrative that covered dozens of regional traditions we have this patchwork of sanitised bullet points to fit a tighter narrative.
• Meanwhile, the script relies on stock phrases combined with odd choices of epithets, to the point it genuinely feels derivative, like a committee stitched together the story from a bunch of pre-existing tropes and slapped the auteur’s name on the final product to call it a day.
• And of course, we have the very odd choices for the characters. I mean there’s one thing to gender-swap Odysseus’s mentor, but to then push an agenda with this modern Helen of Troy that pushes African narcotics to the soldiers and emasculates her husband…

Which is why the internet backlash against the movie is hilarious, considering Homer did all this in the original text, almost three millennia ago. I did mention I was talking about Homer’s Odyssey, right? Oh, the movie? Yeah, Nolan did an epic job, 5 stars.

It’s ridiculous what a lot of the criticism of Nolan’s movie focuses on, when the questions that should be answered are: “Did you watch it? Was it good? Did you like it?”
Nolan’s Odyssey is another retelling of a retelling of a written version of an oral story. There aren’t any facts skewed there, the original epic definitely didn’t happen, and if some parts did happen they weren’t the ones about the Trojan Horse (which isn’t even part of the Illiad and Odyssey), and I’m sure as hell they weren’t the parts where the gods came to Earth to talk to Odysseus. Or Ulysses. Yeah, I was a bit confused about the naming as well. I mean come on, even the main character has his name changed in some versions, and people want accuracy?

Imagine people living in 3826, watching a hologram movie about a boy-wizard named Henric Porter, then some quadrillionaire named Eat-oll Dungsk gets mad that the director cast an Australian dude in the role of Neville Longbottom. Yeah, that’s how silly the whole thing has been. Even Emily Wilson, a translator and writer of one of many adaptations of The Odyssey was reportedly upset at how Nolan adapted the story. That’s a bit much…
I do agree that Nolan has his faults when it comes to writing scripts, his brother usually does a better job, but let’s look at what happened in July: we have Ulysses back in action on the big screen, people are cramming to see films on the largest screens possible instead of streaming, Emily Wilson’s work is one of the best-selling books right now and there is revived interest in Homer’s Epic Cycle. What better outcome is there?
It’s not like Wilson made up the entire story and Nolan messed it up. Heck, not even Homer wrote it. Homer wrote down what was a purely oral story, revised and edited what had been told for centuries by generations of poets, which was already heavily inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh. Was Homer’s version nonetheless a work of art? Yes. So is Emily Wilson’s version, so is Nolan’s adaptation.

Now, adapting the entire Epic Cycle into a movie or a mini-series would be impossible. Not because we don’t have the technology, but mostly because most of the books in it have been lost to history and only The Illiad and The Odyssey have been preserved. We only have fragments from the rest, or brief summaries. I wish we could have had Nolan’s 6-hour or 10-hour version, but for a feature film, the 2h50m crams quite a lot of the essentials. It’s gorgeous and immersive and makes you want more. I loved it.
Christopher Nolan’s version is modern, sure, but in the best sense. It gives you the same feeling the ancient audience would have had listening to the song and lyre version.

Some people had an issue with some of the casual way in which the characters talked. I wonder if they would have preferred if the entire thing was in dactylic hexameter, the way Homer intended! Yeesh… I think we’ve been used to watching too many period movies where all the characters talk in ye olde English, because to me the script was just fine. Except for that shit Matt Damon pulled, when he said their Age of Bronze was over… That felt very out of place.

Although… I’m going to be the devil’s advocate here and say that it was, perhaps, anachronistic of Odysseus to say that. But it would not have been anachronistic of Homer! Let me present you Exhibit A, “Works and Days”, a poem written by Hesiod circa 700BC, close to Homer. Hesiod is the one who introduced the concept of the Ages of Man, framing human history as a steady and depressing decline from a state of divine perfection down to a state of absolute misery.

Hesiod divided history into five eras: The Golden Age (people lived like gods), The Silver Age (people lived as overgrown children then grew up to start killing each other), the Bronze Age (where hardened and violent men cared only about war), the Heroic Age (an upward blip in the decline, an era of heroes like Achilles and Odysseus) and The Iron Age (Hesiod’s own time, where everything just sucked, and it was only a matter of time until the gods packed up and abandoned the Earth). Now… I don’t think Nolan intended for Odysseus to paraphrase Hesiod, and it was probably just a throwaway line that should have been left on the cutting room floor.

As far as casting goes, my criticism is a bit different. For one, I have nothing bad to say about the 10 seconds Lupita Nyong’o was on screen as Helen of Troy. Am I used to Diane Kruger’s character more? Sure. Did it matter that Helen was black? Nah. The character was of such little consequence, that Jared Leto in drag would have worked just as well.

Wanna talk casting choices? How about Charlize Theron as Calypso? Now that was detrimental to the plot, because who wants to try to leave an island where it’s just you and Charlize Theron?
Tom Holland was fine, but too… modern looking? I don’t know how Robert Pattinson does it, but I never think “oh look, Pattinson’s in this”… Whenever I saw Telemachus, however, I did think “oh look, it’s that guy from the Spiderman memes”. And he had a weird accent, like he was not the prince of Ithaca, but the heir of a bodega in Queens.
Matt Damon was great, but it takes a while to get used to him… He’s just Matt Damon, or The Martian, or Matt “how do you like them apples” Damon. How many movies are there already where Damon tries to get home? I don’t know, but there’s enough of them that that’s a meme as well. I think sometimes it’s good to get a lesser known actor, and Nolan does that at times, like how in Tenet he went with the lesser known John David Washington, and that worked out fine…

Anyway, these are nitpicks. I saw The Odyssey on the second day after release, the way God himself intended, on a 20 meter high IMAX screen in 1.43 aspect ratio (albeit a digital projection instead of the 70mm film I wanted). It was glorious, and one of my favourite movies in a long while. Incredible, gorgeous, immersive. Definitely worth it, and I’ll try to convince my girlfriend to go a second and probably third time. And yes, I’m hyped for Homer, I dusted off the ol’ Illiad and Odyssey (in dactylic hexameter, please) and I’m now waiting on the adaptation of the Golden Fleece. Although, even if they cast Charlize Theron again as Theophane the nymph, I’m really not looking forward to her scene with Poseidon in ram form. Yuck.