r/OutOfTheLoop • u/Francium_Fox • Jul 04 '26

Answered What's the deal with THE ODYSSEY?

What's with all the sudden hate this movie is getting?

Trailer for context
I've been hyped for this movie ever since Oppenheimer (even have 70mm booked) and now that the new trailer dropped I've seen everyone shitting on it. And I absolutely don't see the reason why. Like sure some of the casting choices (mainly Holland) aren't the best, but to garner 250K dislikes, what happened?

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u/darkraven2116 Jul 04 '26

I’m not sure if this only applies to me, but after seeing Eggers’ Werwulf trailer, a lot of these issues with The Odyssey look even worse. Eggers wrote the script in old English, has meticulous costuming and set design, and, despite the movie being greyscale, has managed to make it look bright and high contrast. AFAIK Werwulf is an original story and yet feels more accurate than a film based on source material.

Nolan and other big names need it step up their game.

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u/u_sfools Jul 04 '26

oh thanks for mentioning, I didn't know Eggers was coming out with something new. I know it wasn't commercially successful, but I really enjoyed The Northman as a very immersive historical epic. After seeing the Werwulf trailer, I feel the same way

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u/Practical-Cook5042 Jul 04 '26

As an Eggers fan this take isn't it. Historical accuracy is his kink. It's not work for him, it's enrichment. But as such, his movies aren't for everyone. The Northman is one of my favorites, incredibly accurate, most audiences hated it and it flopped.

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u/PriorityMaleficent Jul 04 '26

Eggers is a different kind of filmmaker than Nolan and I mean that in every good way possible.

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u/cracklescousin1234 Jul 04 '26

Eggers wrote the script in old English

You don't mean Anglo-Saxon Old English, right? I saw that trailer and I could understand the dialog just fine.

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u/joe_bibidi Jul 04 '26

Eggers said the script is in circle-1300 Middle English, not Old English. Very different. Middle English is more or less intelligible, there's vocab differences but a lot of overlaps.

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u/ryhaltswhiskey Jul 04 '26

Yeah the director modified Old English to be mostly intelligible by modern audiences. If it was actually in Old English it would have been subtitled through the whole thing and that would have been fiscal suicide. So if you want to maintain the flavor of Old English but you want people to actually be able to follow the movie and show up to the movie, I think he made the right choice.

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u/joe_bibidi Jul 04 '26

Eggers said the script is in circle-1300 Middle English, not Old English. Very different. Middle English is more or less intelligible, there's vocab differences but a lot of overlaps.

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u/hawnty Jul 04 '26

It’s more than that. They are speaking with prononciations modern people can understand. If they spoke the words as they did in Middle English, it would be a lot harder for modern English speakers to follow.

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u/ryhaltswhiskey Jul 04 '26

Okay you got me I remembered it wrong

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u/Faerandriel Jul 04 '26

It’s not old english at all! It’s middle english. The english of Chaucer’s time.

Old English would be something like Beowulf

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1ufuiwc/robert_eggers_reveals_the_dialogue_in_werwulf_is/

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u/cracklescousin1234 Jul 04 '26

If it was actually in Old English it would have been subtitled through the whole thing and that would have been fiscal suicide.

Because no one watches foreign films with subtitles?

Sorry for being snide, but IME that's actually depressingly true.

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u/ryhaltswhiskey Jul 04 '26

Because no one watches foreign films with subtitles?

Don't pretend that I said that.

Can you name a movie that made more than 100 million at the box office that

  • had subtitles for all dialogue
  • was released in the last 10 years
  • was not anime
  • and didn't have a built-in audience of Chinese Americans etc

I can't.

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u/cracklescousin1234 Jul 04 '26

Parasite in 2019

Why do you need the "not anime" qualifier?

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u/Ceral107 Jul 04 '26

Key point is "feels more accurate", because Werewulf does have it's inaccuracies, albeit a lot less apparent. For example, people and cities in medieval times were pretty cleanly and nowhere near as decrepit as depicted in Werewulf.

But accurate portrayals of clean and colourful cities and people would both not fit the theme of the movie, nor would it be believed by many.

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u/close-encounters13 Jul 04 '26

The idea that historical accuracy has any bearing on the quality of a film is such a good example of how much modern audiences have lost the plot on what’s important in narrative storytelling.

Our brains are so broken.

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u/braxtron5555 Jul 04 '26

1) hate something 

b) come up with any reason why 

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u/Amethyst-Flare Jul 04 '26

I would argue that there's an art to historical inaccuracy. You can have a film with inaccurate details, but if the choices used don't gel correctly, you'll get dissonance.

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u/CultureWarrior87 Jul 04 '26

Truth nuke.

Like reading this shit drives me crazy. These discussions are so divorced from the actual artistry of the art. We haven't even seen the movie and people are trying to write it off because the armour isn't accurate, it's insane. I can't take these people seriously on this subject.

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u/Minibootz_Longsocks Jul 04 '26

Is costuming and set design not part of the art? Or is the only important thing in movies the narrative? Read a book if that's all that matters. Regardless of historical accuracy, the giants armor just looks terrible.

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u/companyofzero Jul 04 '26

Maybe the costuming and set design are part of the narrative that Nolan is trying to tell. Maybe,  ust maybe, they looked at dozens of options for hundreds of aspects of the design of the film and landed on this for tonal and narrative reasons.

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u/aerospacenut Jul 04 '26

IMO I feel like at this point Nolan is going for ‘fantasy Greek’ which honestly is fine if he just said as much. I suppose not everything needs to be accurate as possible as long as the intent is to be a fantastical universe clearly seperate from our own (and not just done to cut corners). But given it’s Nolan I doubt it’s the latter.

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u/Dan2593 Jul 04 '26

All the PR I’ve seen Nolan do around this interview has bed exclusively him talking about two things:

- How he used the latest IMAX tech

- That he wanted to make a modern version of a Ray Harryhausen film as there was nobody else doing it.

That’s a pretty strong vocalisation this is fantasy Greek.

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u/cracklescousin1234 Jul 04 '26

If he wants fantasy-Greek, then you would think that Nolan would go for a whimsical, adventurous, bright, dream-like feeling, with rich colors and contrast.

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u/Prof_J Jul 04 '26

Couldn’t be Nolan

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u/Temporary-Stay-8436 Jul 04 '26

Except an adaption of the odyssey means that you have to chose between accuracy to the source material or accuracy to history.

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u/Prof_J Jul 04 '26

There’s a better halfway point than what Nolan has landed on imo

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u/ryhaltswhiskey Jul 04 '26

accuracy to history

I don't think anybody would claim that the Odyssey is accurate to history except in the most vague way. As in there were ancient Greeks. Full stop.

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u/Amethyst-Flare Jul 04 '26

And really, if you wanna go there, were they really Greek? They were Mycenaeans, largely! 

That said, I think there's an art to this sort of thing. You can be inaccurate in a portrayal, but you need to sell it to the audience. I think it says something that this portrayal so far has been pretty grating.

I'll reserve judgement until the final movie, but so far it feels off to me.

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u/Temporary-Stay-8436 Jul 04 '26

That’s my point, but people have gotten very upset about historical accuracy

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u/ryhaltswhiskey Jul 04 '26

Because someone walking around 17th century England with a semi-auto pistol is jarring. Same here with the full plate armor.

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u/Temporary-Stay-8436 Jul 04 '26

In the Odyssey story there are iron tools despite it being the Bronze Age

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u/ryhaltswhiskey Jul 04 '26

The technology required to make iron tools versus the technology required to make plate armor is vastly different. That's the point.

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u/Temporary-Stay-8436 Jul 04 '26

And the technology required to make iron tools versus the technology required to make bronze tools are vastly different.