God that movie was boring, and no not because it had black people.
It felt like they wanted to tell a primarily ‘drama’ type movie; I would say I don’t like that there was so much focus on Telemachus and the suitors, but they cast famous actors, no way were they going to just have them appear in short segments; also Odysseus’ segments wasn’t as fantastical as I would’ve liked so I didn’t feel like I was being kept away from anything interesting. And again, it felt like they wanted to tell a primarily drama type movie; Odysseus felt like a broken man most of the time, and yes, by the end of the movie they reveal why he was so broken the whole time but it doesn’t make having to watch him be like this the entire run a fun journey. Was Christopher Nolan depressed or something and wanted to make a movie to reflect that mood?
Was there ANY good parts to the movie? Few and far between, but my favorite scene was Circe practicing her magic on Odysseus’ men, absolutely fantastic job on the practical effects (cause that’s the other thing; apparently Nolan had a strict ‘no CGI’ rule on effects like this); the Cyclops, while his segment was unimpressive, had a scream that was genuinely monstrous. The acting was amazing but of course it was; they cast accomplished actors who knew how to act.
Ironically though I think casting such famous actors was a mistake; basically you’re looking at this movie and thinking ‘Hey, spider-man! Hey, Edward! Hey, Punisher! Hey, familiar guy who acts in lots of side roles (the blind farmer)!’
Also the locations were dreadfully dull to look at; most of the lands they go to are just forest sections, beaches or deserts. Places were always important to me a in a movie (also games), and I need good, fun environments to really make a movie memorable and exciting, and to make it stand out.
I will say though that perhaps the movie just wasn’t for me, as tons of people enjoyed it and even by the end of the movie people were literally clapping; when Odysseus strings his bow and shoots his arrow, the guy next to me even instinctively just began clapping in excitement. I’m a horror movie fan who also likes heavy fantasy; I’m fine with sword and sandal fantasy, but where the fantasy is more pronounced, like in the older Odyssey movie. This movie just really wasn’t for me, but clearly everyone else in the cinema had a blast.
I don’t know that many actors and never read the Oddysey so I had a great time
I liked that it didn’t show war as glorious and made it clear the war was launched on false pretenses.
I am somewhat familiar with the story of the Trojan War because I read The Song of Achilles. I remember really disliking Odysseusfor his efforts to recruit Achullies
I hear what you’re saying but I personally had been hoping for a more fantastical journey and not a movie about someone’s trauma from war; the movie was far too dramatic for me.
That makes sense! I have a copy of the Odyssey that I bought over 10 years ago, I might dig into it now. The stuff that was cut does sound interesting
Nolan basically turned The Odyssey, a story about overcoming insane odds by being a charasmatic liar who’s so much fun to be around that even the gods cannot but help you, into Oppenheimer 2, where Odysseus carries this tremendous guilt for building a nuclear weapon AKA the Trojan horse. Very strange choice tbh, and the dull grey skies as you pointed out do not help matters at all. They contribute to this awful guilt; why Nolan decided to film in places like Scotland and the Baltic for a story set in the Mediterranean is beyond me. An Odyssey without joy and colour is strange. It was a well made film, and obviously Nolan can do whatever he likes with epics, as did Joyce and Virgil and whoever else who have used this story to suit whatever themes they wanted to explore in the moment, but it was a dreadfully dull affair from a clearly very talented filmmaker.
As somebody who really likes this epic, I actually think the Telemachy (the first four books of the Odyssey where Telemachus goes on his journies) is my favorite part! But alas Nolan cut most of my favorites (including everything at Pylos with Nestor, Helen giving Telemachus and Menelaos drugs to help them party and forget the horrors of war, Athena taking the form of various figures to help Telemachus along the way and grow into himself) AND he totally takes away Telemachus’ growth by having daddy dearest save him from the suitors’ ambush rather than the help of Athena and his own wits; the point of the Telemachy is that Telemachus starts to learn to live for himself, without his father, and become an adult. Nolan undercuts all of this, and it becomes this actually rather pointless journey for him. Telemachus gets a lot of screen time in Nolan’s Odyssey but doesn’t actually get much of an arc or things to do.
A much better writer would’ve handled the dychotomy of Odysseus being an outwardly fun guy to be around, with someone who is slowly realizing the triumphs of his wit may have had bad consequences, too.
Idk, make Odysseus into a pagliacci figure or something. It seems weird that he was all broody and his men seemed to be ride of die for him.
Idk, make Odysseus into a pagliacci figure or something
I can just see it now, he’s complaining about his life and the trauma of his years to be told “why don’t you go on a trip, some sort of… Odyssey” only to go “But Zeus, I am Odysseus!”
or something idk
Nolan basically turned The Odyssey, a story about overcoming insane odds by being a charasmatic liar who’s so much fun to be around that even the gods cannot but help you, into Oppenheimer 2, where Odysseus carries this tremendous guilt for building a nuclear weapon AKA the Trojan horse.
Sounds like a crude reversal of that Golden Age kinda stuff you get from people with statues in their twitter profile. Rather than positing him as a noble exemplar who did no wrong and is just like us, he’s a grim bastard who goes a little too far and is also just like us.
The Baltic ambience could have made sense, the original describes whine colored seas, and even in a Mediterranean climate, days can be very dark when at sea and on bad weather.
Of they had decent fashion and set design, the dark terrain could have been used to highlight the shiny armours, and to make any magic look grander. that would have been an interesting choice, make the heroes literally shine in a dark world.
I never read the Odyssey but I can easily imagine the original stories were more fascinating than what this movie had to offer; it just felt like primarily a tale about a soldier returning from war and carrying personal demons. All the fun of the original story is just gone.
The main thing people forget is that Athena is also a trickster god, she likes mischief, and playing pranks on people. And Ulises is sort of her mortal champion, a wascally wabbit amongst the humans. Yhea he gets owned sometimes because he thinks himself too clever, and gets tricked, and so on, but that’s part of being a trickster. Sorcery is also a very important part of the story because of this, magic is also usted with sligth of and and manipulation. trickster gods are often also gods of magic. Si such a guy is Presley the type to be cast in magical adventures.
That’s why he wears the ivory helmet, to remind the audience that if it came to it, he knows martial arts, and is not all talk.
The main thing people forget is that Athena is also a trickster god, she likes mischief, and playing pranks on people. And Ulises is sort of her mortal champion, a wascally wabbit amongst the humans.
Me who has never read the Odyssey nor watched an adaption outside of some cartoon more than 20 years ago: So Odysseus is like that rabbit God from Watership Down.
Yeah the original is very much Not about a soldier returning from war carrying personal demons. Hell, Odysseus calls himself «sacker of cities» and says it proudly! Odysseus’ problem is actually his curiosity and his need for glory, which constantly gets him into ridiculous situations where he has to use his wits to find his way out of it. The epic even ends with Odysseus once again getting carried away and almost starting a civil war, and Athena has to restrain him and be like “bro.” It’s a poem of excess, bursting with stuff, peoples, stories, lies, triumphs, failures, etc. Nolan’s version has almost none of that.
Throw some Aeneas into it, if you really want to criticize the heroic image of Odysseus yknow? You can canonically have him basically following after the path of the Odyssey shaking his head at the audience in disapproval going “Man this Odysseus guy was kind of a jerk huh? Look at how little he cared about the men under his command.”
They dropped the hilarious nobody pun. I haven’t seen it but that tells me everything I need to know about their attitude towards joy and comedy in the odyssey
Yeah they dropped Poseidon, Zeus, Athena and Hermes too; if not for the cyclops and Circe I would’ve said they were aiming for a historically accurate retelling of the odyssey.
Let that sink in for a second by the way: There is no Zeus, Athena, Poseidon or Hermes, in the Odyssey
Zendaya is Athena, it’s just not flashy
No she isn’t
spoiler
She’s a civilian victim he’s personally haunted by
I thought that was just the form Athena chose to show herself as.
At the end of the movie they reveal who she was; she was a girl who was decapitated and it haunted Odysseus. In the original story she communed directly with Odysseus and Telemachus (which if she’d spoken to Telemachus in the movie it would have confirmed she was actually there); here she’s a figment of Odysseus’ imagination because he’s traumatized.
spoiler
she is, the victim in Troy was Athena walking Earth as a stranger, life in the Zeus’ law stuff they bring up in every Ithaca scene
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Honestly I’m highly doubtful here because when they get storms they’re like ‘Zeus is doing this’, when the waves are powerful, they’re like ‘Poseidon did this’, and he’s also the only person able to perceive her and has never perceived her before that point; in the original story she directly spoke with Odysseus before those events in the movie, she was also involved with Telemachus in the original story and spoke to him directly as well; here it genuinely seems like Zeus, Poseidon and Athena are not part of the story and instead it’s their own beliefs at play. Perhaps the intent is that she truly is supposed to be Athena, but given how ‘Zeus’ and ‘Poseidon’ are portrayed ‘interacting’ with the story, and that only Odysseus has interacted with her and not Telemachus (which would give us confirmation that she was supposed to be Athena) unless I hear the director say that this was the case, I do genuinely feel like they aren’t part of the story.
Can’t argue with your points but for what it’s worth that’s who credits list her as
A recent video from Iranian ethnomusicologist Farya Faraji on this Odyssey really helped me put a finger on what I find annoying about all the discourse surrounding the movie. There’s this performative-feeling need among liberal-progressives to defend a lot of mediocre aspects about it because the chuds called it woke; statements I’ve seen repeated like “who cares if it’s ‘historically accurate’, it’s a myth” or “who cares if it’s shot in mediterranean locations, it’s the creator’s vision of a fantastical story”, “the character designs are heroic fantasy” etc. etc.
And I agree with the take from his video - it’s a huge waste of what could be a really cool and incredibly rare depiction of ancient mediterranean culture that isn’t just whitewashed through the lens of the RETVRN white statue post-roman revisionism. The potential depiction of regional and historic peoples, clothing, music, armor, weapons, environments, even the color saturation, would be so different to what you see in mainstream film and it’s such a loss to go with these boring costumes, grey environments, typical “western” styling.
Farya is great. Folks check him out.
Farya is incredible
I like him a lot but my partner hates him lol. She thinks he’s annoying and all his videos are complaining about how things are inaccurate lol.
I think he’s annoying because his hair and beard are too good. Look like shit and then I’ll relate to you.
I haven’t seen it yet, but I hate it when you’re watching a movie and see someone famous for what seems like a small part, and you’re forced to think “Well that person is going to be more important later to justify the budget”. It’s like Chechov’s actor.
As a horror movie fan, nothing concerns me more than when a famous actor is cast to be in the movie
Every time I see some fucker gassing this movie up all the pictures are so ugly and colorless and the staging isn’t even interesting. I haven’t seen the movie and maybe I got a bad sample, but everything I see of the movie leaves me unable to imagine wanting to watch it because it all just looks so muddled and generic.
it all just looks so muddled and generic
It genuinely is; I really had high hopes for this movie; filmed completely in imax and Nolan at the helm; it ended up being generic slop. I recall at two points they’re walking through different forests and for a moment I thought maybe they’d reused a scene because they looked so shockingly similar. The lack of interesting locations made this feel more like a play (on empty stages) than an epic fantasy (and it wasn’t even slightly epic).
I kinda liked it, but there’s no denying that it was staggeringly ugly. I think this era of movie making is going to be remembered in the same way as the piss filter of 2010s gaming.
I feel like bad Hollywood shit has had a tendency for 10 years now to have a lot of right wing outrage over race and diversity shit and all discussion of that sucks up all the air and then when the thing comes out and it turns out it’s just bad for a lot of reasons any criticism of it is initially perceived as coming from the racists. I.e. the star wars sequels and all the right wing outrage because they had black people and women in it but actually they were just badly written dogshit full of plot holes and bad directing and half straight up stealing plot beats from the originals
Thinking of that because you had to open up with “it sucks, but not because of black people”
Yeah honestly they’ve really poisoned the well on this, but my concern was also that I don’t want people to ever think the racists were right; this movie sucks but not because of all the stuff they’ve been crying about. Any complaint about ‘woke’ movies and they’ll immediately make it seem like it’s because the movie was ‘woke’, not because of actual weaknesses in the movie.
but my concern was also that I don’t want people to ever think the racists were right;
Yeah no exactly, that’s what I mean, it primes people to assume future criticism is coming along the same lines, and then actual criticism has to waste time being like “it sucks but not because of what the racists/misogynists/etc said”
Idk if it’s an intentional ploy by Hollywood, i.e. if they stoke bigoted sentiments to spur and intensify those “discussions” or if they’re entirely organic, but i definitely think it’s something they consciously take advantage of at this point to avoid having to deal with real criticism
I’ll stick with “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” I guess
I hate to be a historical accuracy pedant guy but from the moment I saw that their armor had essentially been rendered as modern plate carriers I lost all interest in the film. I’m gonna see it with family this weekend though so I’m gonna go in with an open mind but i watched a half animated version of Epic the Musical on YouTube a while back and I feel like I’m going to just be thinking about that through the entire Nolan film.
I can’t take the mfs who say taking inspiration from historical armor would have been boring compared to this tired costume design. Total War Troy did a great job taking inspiration from examples like the Dendra Panoply or ancient cloth armor and stylizing it a bit for that fantastic element. There’s a lot of variety in its heroes like Agamemnon, Odysseus, Achilles, Menelaus - there’s color, interesting shapes in the armor and clothing.
If you’re gonna tell me it’s a mythic story and it doesn’t have to be accurate, then why not make it both historically inspired and larger than life? And not this desaturated shit
Honestly those armors you’re showing look really cool;
spoiler
the purpose behind the black armor though was that in the scene where they take Troy, they’re dressed in black and attack on a moonless night so they don’t get seen; given it’s a movie though, they weren’t obligated to actually do all black armor
I would’ve much preferred the armors you’ve shown, but I’m guessing this is probably the director feeling the same way the guys who made the first x-men movie felt, that black was the safest ‘cool’ color (no seriously, the first x-men movie, everyone was dressed in black; it looked ridiculous).
The leather one looks dumb, but I like that Ulises has the ivory helmet, otherwise he doesn’t look manly. Somehow the helmet seems off. But other than that I agree. I also want to point out that dune atradies solders should also have that asthenic, so this movie, and the dune movie both made the exact same mistake of not having Minoan inspired panoply.
I held off on seeing it because I got a similar feeling from the trailers: like, where’s the magic? Not just the literal gods and monsters, but the sense that it’s a heroic adventure rather than a gritty drama. By the sounds of it it’s because it’s a gritty drama rather than a heroic adventure.
Honestly he should’ve just made a historical movie instead; he was clearly trying to show the trauma that war leaves on soldiers, and a realistic historical movie would’ve accomplished that better
spoiler
There was a scene with Circe where she changes Odysseus’ men back to normal and she’s like ‘wear the costume once more’, and like we get it, they’re pigs, you really didn’t need to push the point this hard; this line was entirely unnecessary, but instead they had her say it to each person she removed her magic from
I think Nolan is actually more interested in the bronze age collapse than in the Odyssey itself
I’m still mad about the armor. I will die mad about it
It should’ve been a mini series. Way to much stuff crammed into it. It felt like nothing had weight because they had to keep rushing into the next scene for time reasons.
It is true that a lot of scenes didn’t get the chance to breathe, or be given the time they needed, but dear God I wouldn’t have sat through any more than I did; the mood, the locations, the dim colors of everything, the fact they cut out major characters like Zeus, Athena and Poseidon, and honestly this was not for me. I’m definitely in the minority as most seemed to have enjoyed it, but more of this was never going to be for me to be honest.
Gonna go see it in 70mm here soon, knowing full well that I dislike virtually every Nolan movie, AND that shooting entirely in IMAX makes for some interesting challenges that Nolan absolutely does not have the ability to overcome. Things like only having 3 minutes of film per mag to shoot on. Dude already has a MAJOR editing problem for all of his movies, so cutting down every shot to a 3 minute mag is a bad fuckin idea. (Of course he’s always shot film which isn’t. too much different, but I digress)
My girlfriend has never seen the wonder of a six story tall real deal imax screen (we missed Sinners in 70mm, biggest movie regret of my life) so I’m taking her.
I went to see this in an Imax theater and for the life of me I couldn’t see the difference between it and a regular movie; I remember a scene from the dark knight which pans over a building and thinking ‘wow those graphics are sharp’; I did NOT get that feeling during this movie ever.
Good luck man, this is going to be a three hour slog.
100% should’ve just ripped off Hadestown.
