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An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

• squidsoup 3mo ago
  > "The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality". A pretty succinct summation of Nolan as a filmmaker.
  • fasterik 3mo ago
    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.
    • throw310822 3mo ago
      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.
      • wahern 3mo ago
        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.
        • throw310822 3mo ago
          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.
          • wahern 3mo ago
            As someone who enjoys (especially when I was younger) lucid dreaming, I found Inception well researched, and definitely dove into themes like consciousness, agency, and the reality (or unreality) of cause+effect in human behavior (but even more just the raw experience of lucid dreaming). These are universal themes but quite difficult to explore concretely without resort to contrivance like lucid dreaming (Inception), time reversal (Tenet) or amnesia & reverse narration (Memento). Memento was much more focused on the mental state of both the protagonist and audience, and in that sense was a better dramatic film. Tenet and Inception were much focused on the universe model. Interstellar seemed to be an attempt by Nolan to put human connection and emotion at the center, specifically the transcendence of love, but that approach wasn't a good fit for Nolan's personality or his technical and artistic skills. 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.
  • juleiie 3mo ago
    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
    • Jare 3mo ago
      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.
    • bigstrat2003 3mo ago
      I think Tenet was an absolute garbage movie, and Interstellar was mediocre at best. Honestly, I'm not planning to watch Odyssey because those two movies were so underwhelming.
    • DonHopkins 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      • juleiie 3mo ago
        You will be my first victim Hopkins if you keep making fun of people going through crisises How did you make up some random reality where I live in a country with Access to firearms? And what prompted you to make up some story in your head about a random internet user? Are you currently suffering from dementia? If so i advice you to stay away from the internet. You are an old guy, you should be smarter than trolling.
        • DonHopkins 3mo ago
          [flagged]
  • ks2048 3mo ago
    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.
• bragh 3mo ago
  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.
  • runarberg 3mo ago
    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.
  • squidsoup 3mo ago
    Greek mythology is full of sex, and the Odyssey is no exception.
    • petesergeant 3mo ago
      The Odyssey is full of worrying about who might bang who, rather than actual sex.
    • bragh 3mo ago
      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?
  • GlobalFrog 3mo ago
    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.
    • wzdd 3mo ago
      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).
• class3shock 3mo ago
  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.
  • kombookcha 3mo ago
    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.
    • niekiepriekie 3mo ago
      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.
• deleted 3mo ago
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• cocacola1 3mo ago
  I enjoyed her translation. Also really liked the movie. 10/10, trying to rewatch in IMAX without having to take front row seats.
• petesergeant 3mo ago
  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?
  • blitzar 3mo ago
    Reads like the author is getting paid by the word and using all of them
  • epihelix 3mo ago
    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.
  • IOT_Apprentice 3mo ago
    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.
  • nchmy 3mo ago
    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).
  • leephillips 3mo ago
• zooweemama 3mo ago
  I haven't seen it yet, but how do people feel it compares to Lord of the Rings as an adaptation?
  • radu_floricica 3mo ago
    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.
    • WalterBright 3mo ago
      > 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.
    • d3Xt3r 3mo ago
      > 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).
      • 3mo ago
• protocolture 3mo ago
  Take <standard hollywood mythoslop> add <overrated director who cant handle audio engineering> and apparently you get $$$$$$$$
  • denkmoon 3mo ago
    Is the audio engineering bad in this one like all his others?
    • protocolture 3mo ago
      After Dunkirk and Tenet I wont be tricked into finding out again.
    • jbstack 3mo ago
      Yes. It's often hard to hear the dialogue.
      • nchmy 3mo ago
        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)
        • leephillips 3mo ago
          Haha, exactly the same experience: I also watched in C.A. and benefited from the Spanish subtitles to clarify occasional dialog. Agree about dubbing.
• radu_floricica 3mo ago
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• throwaway3060 3mo ago
  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.
  • watwut 3mo ago
    Willson is actual expert. I also think that it is ok to be unrealistic in myth movie.
    • throwaway3060 3mo ago
      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_is_it_never_proposed_that_the_sea_peoples_of/ 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.
    • Daz912 3mo ago
      [dead]
  • ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
    This may blow your mind, but what if the "People From the Sea" are Odysseus, his family, and his crew? * It was Penelope herself who voiced her fear of the People From the Sea. Did anyone outside of this group mention the People From the Sea? Was anyone outside of the group anticipating, terrified, or already terrorized by some other group? * Ithaca is an island kingdom; anyone who lives there is a sailor by experience, and all of Greece is a region of islands and archipelagos * Odysseus and his crew had not seen them or found them, because they are not sufficiently self-aware or spiritual * They violated the Law of Zeus. All of them. * That's why the Trojan Horse didn't have wheels. It was terrible to drag across dry land, but it was made of buoyant wood. It was a seahorse. * Everyone they met, from the Trojans to Circe to Calypso and the Cyclopes, obesrved them to approach from the sea, land on the shore, and leave the same way * They (Odysseus and his family) ultimately attacked Ithaca (the suitors) * Odysseus, his wife and son go into exile by boat, and sail west, [beyond Gibraltar], thus permanently becoming People Of The Sea * The Odyssey is a myth, fiction, legendary, and none of its characters actually existed * The People From the Sea are not mentioned in Homer's text. They're extra-canonical. They were hypothesized, starting in the 19th century.
• mi_lk 3mo ago
  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.
  • w0de0 3mo ago
    She’s not a lit critic, rather a classicist and the author of the most popular recent translations of Homer.
    • krige 3mo ago
      Also one of the most controversial translations, if memory serves.
      • jrimbault 3mo ago
        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
        • modo_mario 3mo ago
          >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."
          • watwut 3mo ago
            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?
• madhu_ghalame 3mo ago
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• beloch 3mo ago
  "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.
  • izacus 3mo ago
    > 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.
    • 2Pacalypse- 3mo ago
• nickcw 3mo ago
  [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.
  • antonvs 3mo ago
    > "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.
    • warrenmiller 3mo ago
      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-translator-emily-wilson-attacks-nolan-blockbuster https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jul/27/odyssey-transla...
      • antonvs 3mo ago
        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.
• dsign 3mo ago
  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 https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103T4T
  • gabriel666smith 3mo ago
    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.
    • runarberg 3mo ago
      > Nolan has a unique talent [...] amongst contemporary Hollywood directors for capturing and reflecting contemporary and near-future textures and preoccupations. 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.
• forgingahead 3mo ago
  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.
  • netsharc 3mo ago
    > 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-ungrateful-refugee https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-nayeri-un...
• 4gotunameagain 3mo ago
  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.
  • throwawaytodey 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • TFNA 3mo ago
    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.
  • squibonpig 3mo ago
    I think that the point is simply that the casting failed at the implicit goal of being in some way progressive (and was probably a marketing stunt). Who cares if French people would be fine with a homogeneous movie? It was made in America.
• jf 3mo ago
  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.
  • izacus 3mo ago
    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.
    • keiferski 3mo ago
      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.
      • izacus 3mo ago
        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.
• iamyemeth 3mo ago
  "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
• apeescape 3mo ago
  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.
  • nchmy 3mo ago
    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.
• jurajbla 3mo ago
  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?
• DaedalusII 3mo ago
  "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
  • keiferski 3mo ago
    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.
    • DaedalusII 3mo ago
      maybe like this, gary oldman 1990s would have been good. there needs to be a feeling of some edge or at least mystery, depth
      • keiferski 3mo ago
        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.
  • Gander5739 3mo ago
    They wrote at length on this particular translation choice: https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated
  • TheCoelacanth 3mo ago
    Every translation has to make tradeoffs. There's no way to perfectly translate a 2500 year old poem whose audience had an almost unfathomably different world view than a modern audience. Wilson chose to prioritize making the translation uncomplicated and metrical the way it would have been to the original audience instead of trying to capture the full meaning of every single word. No other translation has done that before. They either aren't in meter or they torture the English language into strange and complicated grammar that has a very different effect on the audience than the original would have. If you want different tradeoffs, then there are countless other translations to choose from. There would be no point writing a new translation if you aren't going to choose different tradeoffs.
• ks2048 3mo ago
  [spoiler alert] > The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. Did she miss the most important scene in the burning of Troy that showed a Trojan victim's face that plays an important role the film?
  • jrimbault 3mo ago
    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.
  • JsonDemWitOster 3mo ago
    Reminds me of when Oppenheimer released, a bunch of people criticized it for not actually featuring any Japanese characters, instead being relegated to mere dream-shadows that Oppenheimer sees once. 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".
• ks2048 3mo ago
  > 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".
  • fineIllregister 3mo ago
    > 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.
• thinkingemote 3mo ago
  "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.
  • nchmy 3mo ago
    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.
• weiliddat 3mo ago
  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.
• Kon5ole 3mo ago
  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.
  • jefurii 3mo ago
    > Nothing is in focus IIRC there was a lot of bokeh which seemed to me like an artistic choice.
• foldr 3mo ago
  > 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).
  • runarberg 3mo ago
    I think other people can explain it better then me, but here is my (extreme) layperson understanding. 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).
  • antibarbarus 3mo ago
    The Homeric epic as we have come to understand it is actually a kind of collective oral poetry, memorised, rendered and promulgated through a series of techniques, most notably formulae. One such formula is a "common epithet" associated with characters, somewhat famously, "cow-eyed" Hera, for Zeus’ wife. Another is, for example, a catalogue, an eldless barrage of names, locations, places, etc. common across many epic oral traditions. 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.
• fineIllregister 3mo ago
  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.
  • ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
    > 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.
    • fineIllregister 3mo ago
      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.
• glimshe 3mo ago
  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.
• stasomatic 3mo ago
  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.
  • seabombs 3mo ago
    I have almost no experience of archery and this annoyed me. So many close shots of Odysseus or other soldiers limply firing arrows that look like they'd barely make it five feet. But the next shot is a soldier getting barrelled off his feet by the force of it...
    • stasomatic 3mo ago
      If anyone is at all interested, "War of the Arrows" [0], while taking some liberties (string twisting for trick shots, ex), as it's a movie, is a pretty accurate portrayal of warbow archery. The plot is shallow - boy saves girl - but I enjoyed it. It's in Korean, but very watchable with subs. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2025526/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov_sm_3#amzn1.imdb.concept.name_credit_group.7caf7d16-5db9-4f4f-8864-d4c6e711c686 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2025526/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov...
  • widdershins 3mo ago
    Yeah, I'm not an archery nerd and even I could see that the archery looked very poor compared to other movies like Lord of the Rings. There didn't seem to be any weight to the draw in most casts.
• zombot 3mo ago
  > 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.
• padjo 3mo ago
  "It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words." Is an evergreen take on Nolan's movies for me.
• axiologist 3mo ago
  https://archive.ph/gc8pQ https://archive.ph/gc8pQ
• bennettnate5 3mo ago
  > The most memorable creative responses to The Odyssey – such as Euripides’ Helen, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe or Lisa Peterson’s play set in a modern migrant camp – Hey, she forgot to include O Brother, Where Art Thou! \s
• amelung 3mo ago
  On a constructive note, Wilson left not unattested how Homer should be performed in her view, by herself – link: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bfDgXqd54CU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bfDgXqd54CU – and who Americaʼs Homer may be, namely Tracy Chapman – link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48913656 about https://www.plough.com/articles/who-is-americas-homer https://www.plough.com/articles/who-is-americas-homer –, so Nolan now knows whom to ask when he needs a script next time, for an Ilias movie.