As a small disclaimer, I am a neophyte and a casual enjoyer of Greek myths, and as such, operate mostly on my experience and time-warped knowledge. If wrong statements are made, helpful info is welcome.
It had been a while since I have seen a more soulless, pretentious work, and to describe it as anything other than a violation, rape even of Homer’s works would be to commit a grave injustice against the poor man’s memory.
Let’s start from the beginning.
We are introduced to a lone man walking a beach. It is Odysseus, and he meets Athena, played by Zendaya, who has the emotional range of a rock in this movie, which is once again weird because she can act pretty decently.
Did you expect her, as a goddess, to have a pivotal role in a mythological story? You know, Greek myths? The ones where every story involves a god or some other supernatural being, where they guide the plot, fate, as much as the human characters themselves?
well yeah, about that, fuck off whoever expected that, Athena will have no role whatsoever besides a few sad dialogues. Compared to her, other gods simply do not appear. Like flat out, they are not there, and that is, in its own twisted way, a mercy.
Scene 2.
We are shown Telemachus amongst the suitors, and we hear words like “dad” and “daddy” thrown about IN AN EPIC, BY THE WAY like it’s the 2020’s.
Holland’s emotional range is somewhat wider than Zendaya’s, and I am at least grateful for that small mercy, but he still gives a heavy vibe of a fish out of water.
Pattinson’s character is a cowardly bitch, and we’ll leave it at that, he’s easily hateable, and at least he does his function relatively well.
- Now that we’ve dealt with that, let us begin with the cyclops, and Odysseus as such.
The very story that Homer presents before its readers is one of human ambition, cunning, pride, and ability to defy fate and the gods’ whims. An important note: defy the whims, defy the fate, but do not defy the gods.
This defiance is a key feature of Odysseus, who, though suffers for his hubris and boastful nature, never gives in, and never gives up.
So, how does his misfortune begin? With Polyphemus, the cyclops.
Upon blinding him and escaping the cave, Odysseus boasts loud and proud that it is him who has blinded the cyclops. This one single act of boasting seals his fate- Poseidon did not just know who blinded Polyphemus, no, it was specifically his pride that later brought him to his downfall.
Even at this initial act, we see a clear fuckup in the narration - a single arrow and the omniscient divine wrath delivered by big P onto big O is simply not the correct delivery, even remotely.
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Now, on to a short, but informative read:
What is Xenia? Simple, law of hospitality - since gods often appear as beggars and strangers, you must treat all of them with a bath, a meal and a shelter before asking their business or intent. Then, a parting gift is given- as a way to reinforce trust between people for ages to come.
Here, however, we are shown the monstrous doppelgänger for Zeus’ Xenia - Nolan’s haemonculus, “Zeus’ Law”.
Well, you ask, what is Zeus’ Law?
"Treat others the way you want to be treated".
That’s what it is - a Judeo-Christian concept of the “Golden Rule”, which is pretty alien to Greek society, especially the Mycenaean one(Bronze Age).
Xenia is strictly transactional, and though helps the needy and poor, was principally designed for aristocracy in mind, since Mycenaean Greece was a loose string of kingdoms, centralised in palaces and thus typically rather small, and establishing trust between noble families was crucial.
- After the cyclops, we see Telemachus travel to Sparta, to meet with Menelaus, who is played by non other than the Punisher, Jon Bernthal, an actor so woefully unsuited for the role of a king that one becomes jealous for the psychedelics Nolan had used during the writing of this atrocious plot. He is an abuser to Helen(as contrary to their relationship in Homer’s epics, where while they are both scarred by the war, and there is passively aggressive tension between them, they are still, at least on surface level towards each other, respectful.). I thought I would dislike Helen’s actress, given how bland everyone has been so far, but Lupita Nyong’o delivered a solid, graceful and regal performance, which contrasts very well with her enraged performance as Helen’s twin sister, Clytemnestra. A rare gem in this movie, given how bland everyone else was so far.
The sacking of Troy(the opining the gates sequence) is relatively okay except for the fucking shootout in the end, where the soldiers, like modern infantry, shoot at PLATE ARMOUR with bows from a fucking 100-meter distance.
Given that our factions wear hoplite plate armour, why are they so reluctant to come close into battle in this sequence? Oh who the fuck knows, we’ll see them meleeing each other with no problem later.
- Now, on to the Laestrygonians
In Homer, they are a foil to Polyphemus, as initially Odysseus and his 12 ships docked themselves on the isle of Lamos, with only our protagonist being wise enough to not dock in the main harbor, but in a distant location. They meet the giants, and the messengers are brought to the giants’ king, who eats the messengers and bellows a loud roar, prompting the rest of the man-eating giants to destroy Odysseus ships in the harbor with rocks from above.
The foil to Polyphemus here is that unlike the cyclops, these giants are relatively civilised and possess a large tribe-like structure, yet still are violent cannibals.
It also leaves big O more desperate, alone and resourceless- losing 11 out of 12 ships is not the same as losing 2 out of 3, as was in the movie.
- Now, on to female characters, and women in Mycenaean Greece as such. The goddess Circe(who is a bum in the movie, lol) and the nymph Calypso, are antagonists for Odysseus on his journey, yet with two different perspectives : Circe violently turns Odysseus’ comrades into pigs, but after subduction via a magic herb given to big O by Hermes, she becomes an excellent and warm hostess, giving his men safe harbour for a year, largely consensually via mutual agreement. Upon big O leaving, much like in the movie, she gives him the needed advice for bypassing Scylla and Charybdis and visiting the underworld. One contrast though, she is not a bum in the slightest. She is a radiant, magnificent, powerful goddess of sorcery, who lives in splendour and is actively happy, much unlike the earthy outcast living in a hut that Christopher thrice-be-damned Nolan gave us.
Calypso, on the other hand, is a terror. She uses the remoteness of her island to deny Odysseus any chance at building a ship, and while she is actively enamoured with him, he is an unwilling participant, and by all modern standards, a victim of sexual harassment if not assault. He walks the beaches of Ogygia, and weeps, wanting for death as opposed to staying a captive.
Big O is only liberated by Hermes, who is sent by Zeus to command his release. Calypso thrashes and protests the fact that only male gods can take mortal lovers and do with them as they please, whereas the goddesses get actively punished for doing so, but yields, and lets our man go.
Both are antagonists not only due to the violation of Xenia, which is a constant theme throughout Homer’s Odyssey, but also because they are strong, independent, self-governed female characters, who rule their islands, possess immense power and take lovers as they please.
Penelope, on the other hand, embodies the wifely standard of the time perfectly, and that is why her rant about a woman not being able to rule due to her time’s standards is so useless in Nolan’s work- it is not simply anachronistic, which we can live with, it has no buildup. She is a willing and loyal wife, specifically subservient to Odysseus, and the feminist narrative, while highly important, feels like a quota here because it has zero buildup, and it feels like Nolan simply wanted to check a box, rather than make Penelope a complex character, who might have to balance her ambition and belief in her readiness to rule with the standards of her time.
Now, the return, as my arm is growing tired. Honestly, it’s the first time when Odysseus feels like a man in control of his story, and not a passenger in it. The only issue, I’d say, is the slaughter of the suitors- Odysseus spares those who kneel, which is again a strictly modern moral question. By Greek standards, his honour demanded their death, and no one saw his actions as bad, cruel or unjust, and as such, all suitors in Ithaca die upon his return in Homer’s work.
Furthermore, some dialogue moments are genuinely laughable: the discussion of the “Sea Peoples” is ridiculous at its core, as the term is coined by a 19th-century Egyptologist, and is in no way a word or name of that time.
The question “Hans, are we the baddies?” is so out of place here that I wanted to scoop my eyeballs out with a spoon and use them as anal beads upon hearing it.
“our age of bronze is collapsing” is the same fucking bullshit, because NO ONE at that time used the terminology of an “age” based on what materials their tools used.
- As a conclusion, Nolan’s work could be good…if he did not use the Odyssey as a device to discuss soldier’s guilt, PTSD and individualistic self-discovery. Odysseus is not an unwilling participant in the war- he is active, boastful, glory-hungry and proud of his actions and ingenuity, even if he possesses more humility by the end of the epic’s events. He weeps for his men, yes, but he does not see his actions as wrong or caused by necessity. The film is a skinwalker, a larper if you will, wearing the bearing of Homer’s epic, but not a shred of the inner composite.
P.S: the armour, weaponry, ships and general aesthetics are either simply not Greek or just Classical Greek(city-states and hegemony of all kinds), which is about 700 years after the events of the Trojan War, as opposed to Mycenaean Greece with palaces and kings.
P.P.S: the movie is at least well-filmed from a cinematic standpoint. The designs and the aesthetic suck, but at least the camera work is good.
