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

"... 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.

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.

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.

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

It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.

"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.

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?".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wish he would go back to his older philosophy of movie making but he never made a bad movie I Think

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 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.

* 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.

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...

I also think that it is ok to be unrealistic in myth movie.

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.

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.

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...

This review was an amazing read, by an amazing writer, and in my opinion these 11 words were the best part.

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.

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.