Thanks for a balanced review of the film, acknowledging its problematic aspects while highlighting its virtues. A friend of mine who is half Greek (but also all American) practically frothed at the mouth online about the casting choices.
Re: The Christian Odysseus is also regretful about the violence unleashed on civilians at Troy, and the destruction of a civilisation. The Odysseus of Homer not only doesn’t feel bad about this
To be fair to the ancient Greeks, by the classical era at least some twinges of conscience were being felt. Euripides, in the fifth century BC, wrote The Trojan Women which is a furious indictment of Greek cruelty to the women of Troy, and traditionally seen as an indirect slam against the Athenian massacre at Melos. IMO, it is still the most potent antiwar work we have. Two generations later Plato expressed disapproval against the traditional mythical treatment of the gods as corrupt adulterers. Some of this (especially Plato) would feed into early Christianity, where the original Judaic strain (which had its own bloodthirsty moments too) was partially eclipsed by late Hellenic elements. I am surprised to hear the film omits Odysseus' affair with Circe and tries to muddy his long lasting stint as Calypso's boytoy. That sort of thing is hardly shocking to modern culture.
A minor note: The Bronze Age collapse was broader than just the Mediterranean world. Shang China also went under.
" ‘Colour-blind’, implying some artistic devotion either to meritocracy or box office profit, is not an accurate term; the Mexican Anthony Quinn playing Antinous the suitor in the 1954 epic, or Colombian-American John Leguizamo in the current film, is ‘colour-blind’, in the sense that a big-name star can overcome a slight physiognomic inaccuracy."
Latin Americans were not considered "non-white" until Marxian activists sought to create the "Hispanic" category in the 1960s in order to cash in on the benefits being doled out to Blacks.
When I visited Greece a couple of years back I couldn't help but notice many blue eyed Greeks. In antiquity at least some Greeks were blond and light eyed. Alexander the Great, not fully Greek admittedly, was blonde and heterochromic -- one green eye and and one blue eye. However Homer does seem to want us to picture Odysseus as stocky and dark rather than tall and fair.
Latin American is a bit of strange ethnic group. If an African American and white man with ginger hair from Northern Ireland were to migrate to Spain, they wouldn't think of themselves as being the same ethnic group.
However a black Cuban and someone like Jorge Garcia are meant to be the same ethnic group (to be honest, if Jorge Garcia had changed his name to George Brown, I would never have realised his family weren't Anglo Saxon).
I am not entirely sure this would benefit Latin Americans - if they were recorded as an ethnicity - they might be seen as receiving more social housing as other groups - which would not benefit them.
I’m not sure that quite captures it. In Australia in the 1980s Italian immigrants were outsiders (w*gs). It’s not hard to imagine Hispanics in the USA being also seen that way by the dominant anglos.
I studied the Iliad at school and in Latin translation rather than in Greek. I did not study the Odyssey at all. I'm hoping that, in any future family conversations about the film, this lends some gravitas to any opinion I might offer but simultaneously provides an escape route once they all realise, yet again, that dad doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
"pre-release controversy provoked by the casting..."
Nolan has always been weird with casting; he gets people you thought had been relegated to straight to video stuff to appear in his films (Rutger Hauer in one of the Batman films, Tom Berenger in Inception, Josh Hartnett in Oppenheimer). Sean Avery, a Canadian hockey player has appeared in a few of his films. Tim Booth - the lead singer of the band James - is in Batman Begins. Harry Styles in Dunkirk, which also features a small role for the woman who played Helga in Allo Allo (she's Nolan's aunt).
Leaving the theater I turned to my friend and said it was interesting Odysseus was a proto-Christian rather than a man of his time. A classical tale with a classical worldview would be inexplicable to most viewers. It leaves something on the table though.
I'm going to happily cast my lot with the wokes on the Lupita N'yongo casting. She has an exotic beauty that jumps off the screen and makes small part(s) feel big. The movie makes it clear there's plenty of realpolitik driving the Trojan War anyway not just her beauty.
I think I'm actually of the view that wife-stealing is as plausible as a trade war. It's such a huge cause of wars in many societies. it's also true that women often fall in love with their captors.
Agree that N'yongo is striking, and this isn't about her attractiveness necessarily. Mendelson was actually quite interesting on the podcast, saying that if he directed a film he wouldn't actually show her face. good idea I thought
Instead of showing her face, you could do a quick cut to scene of a thousand ships being launched, as in "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"
Clever last paragraph: the interloper abusing hospitality and overstaying their welcome.
Yup Pakistani rape gangs and sharia law are not neighbourly behaviour. Meanwhile, perplexed, whitey from blighty looks on as his 7th PM in 10 years takes office with a new plan to stop the rot.
I put the over under at 18 months for Andy. As for your civilization, I’ll take the under. It’s a shame. Or is it a crime? And, is collapse inevitable?
I say yes. It’s gonna take another seven Prime Minister‘s and then it’ll be too late.
I am not sure a more 'true to ancient values' film might not have been better. Certainly more memorable and terrifying. Lean into it! But I hugely enjoyed it even while finding tons of things I thought were done wrong. Nudity for example. Has Game of Thrones taught us nothing? And who wears a helmet while rowing?? I could go on. At length!
"The Odyssey opens with the American rapper Travis Scott playing Phemius, the court bard in Ithaca, knocking on the floor rhythmically as he tells the story of Troy. ‘Woke nonsense!’ I screamed from the fourth row as my children crawled into their seats in embarrassment and shame."
I guess one can yell in a crowded theatre to use the hypothetical many use to describe the "limits" of free speech!
"When Julius Caesar declared that he had killed a million people in Gaul, it was a boast; a thousand years’ later William the Conqueror, another continental warlord who stepped foot on Britain, exited the world expressing remorse about the horror he had inflicted on his victims, worried about his eternal soul."
It's most extraordinary how killing hundreds of thousands of an entire ethnic group is something one would actually boast about to praise in the ancient world.
Even Heinrich Himmler wanted to keep conduct the Final Solution as secretly as possible.
Caesar wasn't trying to commit genocide against all Celts, many of whom were already thoroughly Romanized (in Italy and Iberia and southern Gaul). He was trying to crush all possible resistance to Roman rule. William the Conqueror may have had regrets-- but a couple centuries later Genghis Khan had none.
I also enjoyed it a lot. I always say that a bad adaptation can still be a great film in its own right and, for me, this was one of those cases. Sean Bean in Troy was a better Odysseus than Matt Damon was though. That said he’s also a better actor to be fair.
The biggest disappointment for me was actually the confrontation with the suitors. I assumed that, in lieu of his servants as in the poem, it would be the beggars who took the weapons and helped him kill all the suitors. But instead they get Damon to essentially do it alone. It just came off as quite tacky to me.
Another odyssey, that of Captain Cook in HM Bark ENDEAVOUR - the inspiration for Captain Kirk’s five year mission to explore strange new worlds in the USS ENTERPRISE - and then in HMS RESOLUTION also ended when the visitor outstayed his welcome - in the Sandwich Islands, sometimes known as “Hawaii”.
I am a great admirer of Christopher Nolan. In the last six months I have watched Inception again, for the fifth time, this time at an IMAX, and revisited Interstellar. I was also deeply moved by Oppenheimer.
So I was surprised by how little The Odyssey affected me. It is visually stunning and technically remarkable, but I found it emotionally constricted. The famous incidents are there, but for me they never quite add up to a convincing sense of what the journey has done to Odysseus.
I found The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, much more moving. It is a much sparser film. There is less action and there are long stretches of silence, but the actors inhabit the anguish of loss and absence in a way I found far more immersive. You feel what twenty years have done to Odysseus and Penelope, and how difficult it is for them simply to be in the same world again.
I am planning to buy The Return on Blu ray and watch it again. I am not sure I will be returning to The Odyssey.
I have not seen the Nolan film yet. I have been bothered by the reviews and it sounds like it has been excessively modernized with language such as daddy versus father. I realize that no one but Greek scholars can read it in its native tongue but I have read some top translations and found them beautiful. The Return was excellent. The internal tension and grief and anger are very powerful
I won’t pay to watch it in the cinema out of principle (the obligatory diversity added so the film can Oscar) and so will have to wait until it streams cheaply.
For me, the diversity of the casting did not hinder my enjoyment of the film at all. Lupita Nyong’o was utterly convincing in the dual roles of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra.
What did occasionally jar was some of the language modernisation, particularly Tom Holland’s Telemachus calling Odysseus “Daddy” rather than “Father”.
And my reservations about the film remain its relative its lack of emotional depth compared to The Return
"Stranger still is their religion. As portrayed in the epics, the gods are cruel and unbelievably petty, their relationship with the mortals entirely transactional. And as men create gods in their own image, the Greek warriors are also an unappealing bunch, in particular the domineering, arrogant Agamemnon and the psychotic Achilles. The only Greek I felt for was poor Ajax; he did his best, but the gods just hated him."
Nietzsche believed that the Hebrew God of the Old Testament was more realistic than Christ of the New Testament in the sense of being similar to the gods of the ancient world - that is to say an a**hole.
The gods of myth were the gods of the Greek religion-- but the Greek religion also included the mystery cults which engaged the worshiper on a much more personal level.
Thanks for a balanced review of the film, acknowledging its problematic aspects while highlighting its virtues. A friend of mine who is half Greek (but also all American) practically frothed at the mouth online about the casting choices.
Re: The Christian Odysseus is also regretful about the violence unleashed on civilians at Troy, and the destruction of a civilisation. The Odysseus of Homer not only doesn’t feel bad about this
To be fair to the ancient Greeks, by the classical era at least some twinges of conscience were being felt. Euripides, in the fifth century BC, wrote The Trojan Women which is a furious indictment of Greek cruelty to the women of Troy, and traditionally seen as an indirect slam against the Athenian massacre at Melos. IMO, it is still the most potent antiwar work we have. Two generations later Plato expressed disapproval against the traditional mythical treatment of the gods as corrupt adulterers. Some of this (especially Plato) would feed into early Christianity, where the original Judaic strain (which had its own bloodthirsty moments too) was partially eclipsed by late Hellenic elements. I am surprised to hear the film omits Odysseus' affair with Circe and tries to muddy his long lasting stint as Calypso's boytoy. That sort of thing is hardly shocking to modern culture.
A minor note: The Bronze Age collapse was broader than just the Mediterranean world. Shang China also went under.
yes that is true. i think we may have done that at A-Level.
" ‘Colour-blind’, implying some artistic devotion either to meritocracy or box office profit, is not an accurate term; the Mexican Anthony Quinn playing Antinous the suitor in the 1954 epic, or Colombian-American John Leguizamo in the current film, is ‘colour-blind’, in the sense that a big-name star can overcome a slight physiognomic inaccuracy."
Latin Americans were not considered "non-white" until Marxian activists sought to create the "Hispanic" category in the 1960s in order to cash in on the benefits being doled out to Blacks.
https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/the-invention-hispanics-what-it-says-about-the-politics-race
When I visited Greece a couple of years back I couldn't help but notice many blue eyed Greeks. In antiquity at least some Greeks were blond and light eyed. Alexander the Great, not fully Greek admittedly, was blonde and heterochromic -- one green eye and and one blue eye. However Homer does seem to want us to picture Odysseus as stocky and dark rather than tall and fair.
just like David Bowie.
I mentioned a friend who is half Greek (his mother is of Quebecois stock a few generations back). He has blue eyes.
I once worked with a guy with a Greek name who was blond, though he noted himself that his ancestry was more Macedonian Slav than Greek.
I had a Greek professor of Greek philosophy who had blue eyes.
Latin American is a bit of strange ethnic group. If an African American and white man with ginger hair from Northern Ireland were to migrate to Spain, they wouldn't think of themselves as being the same ethnic group.
However a black Cuban and someone like Jorge Garcia are meant to be the same ethnic group (to be honest, if Jorge Garcia had changed his name to George Brown, I would never have realised his family weren't Anglo Saxon).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Garcia
"Hispanic" is really more of a linguistic category like "Slavic" or "Celtic".
You are right although most speakers of Celtic languages are alike racially.
There is however a campaign for Latino to be an ethnic category in the UK, which I don't think is logical
https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/news/21052026-latin-americans-in-the-uk-campaigning-for-recognition
I am not entirely sure this would benefit Latin Americans - if they were recorded as an ethnicity - they might be seen as receiving more social housing as other groups - which would not benefit them.
Indeed.
I’m not sure that quite captures it. In Australia in the 1980s Italian immigrants were outsiders (w*gs). It’s not hard to imagine Hispanics in the USA being also seen that way by the dominant anglos.
I studied the Iliad at school and in Latin translation rather than in Greek. I did not study the Odyssey at all. I'm hoping that, in any future family conversations about the film, this lends some gravitas to any opinion I might offer but simultaneously provides an escape route once they all realise, yet again, that dad doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
Aren't there some words missing in the Charleze Theron bit? I read it several times, worried that I might have had a stroke.
"pre-release controversy provoked by the casting..."
Nolan has always been weird with casting; he gets people you thought had been relegated to straight to video stuff to appear in his films (Rutger Hauer in one of the Batman films, Tom Berenger in Inception, Josh Hartnett in Oppenheimer). Sean Avery, a Canadian hockey player has appeared in a few of his films. Tim Booth - the lead singer of the band James - is in Batman Begins. Harry Styles in Dunkirk, which also features a small role for the woman who played Helga in Allo Allo (she's Nolan's aunt).
wow, didn't know that about Helga.
Leaving the theater I turned to my friend and said it was interesting Odysseus was a proto-Christian rather than a man of his time. A classical tale with a classical worldview would be inexplicable to most viewers. It leaves something on the table though.
I'm going to happily cast my lot with the wokes on the Lupita N'yongo casting. She has an exotic beauty that jumps off the screen and makes small part(s) feel big. The movie makes it clear there's plenty of realpolitik driving the Trojan War anyway not just her beauty.
WOKE
I think I'm actually of the view that wife-stealing is as plausible as a trade war. It's such a huge cause of wars in many societies. it's also true that women often fall in love with their captors.
Agree that N'yongo is striking, and this isn't about her attractiveness necessarily. Mendelson was actually quite interesting on the podcast, saying that if he directed a film he wouldn't actually show her face. good idea I thought
Instead of showing her face, you could do a quick cut to scene of a thousand ships being launched, as in "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"
Clever last paragraph: the interloper abusing hospitality and overstaying their welcome.
Yup Pakistani rape gangs and sharia law are not neighbourly behaviour. Meanwhile, perplexed, whitey from blighty looks on as his 7th PM in 10 years takes office with a new plan to stop the rot.
I put the over under at 18 months for Andy. As for your civilization, I’ll take the under. It’s a shame. Or is it a crime? And, is collapse inevitable?
I say yes. It’s gonna take another seven Prime Minister‘s and then it’ll be too late.
I liked the last paragraph.
Very clever; it said a lot without saying too much.
I am not sure a more 'true to ancient values' film might not have been better. Certainly more memorable and terrifying. Lean into it! But I hugely enjoyed it even while finding tons of things I thought were done wrong. Nudity for example. Has Game of Thrones taught us nothing? And who wears a helmet while rowing?? I could go on. At length!
Even with Game of Thrones, Tyrion and Jon Snow provide a sort of Christian worldview though. Without them it would be terrible.
I guess I am looking for something more horror filled. A sort of classical Apocalypse Now. Or even Starship Troopers!
"The Odyssey opens with the American rapper Travis Scott playing Phemius, the court bard in Ithaca, knocking on the floor rhythmically as he tells the story of Troy. ‘Woke nonsense!’ I screamed from the fourth row as my children crawled into their seats in embarrassment and shame."
I guess one can yell in a crowded theatre to use the hypothetical many use to describe the "limits" of free speech!
"When Julius Caesar declared that he had killed a million people in Gaul, it was a boast; a thousand years’ later William the Conqueror, another continental warlord who stepped foot on Britain, exited the world expressing remorse about the horror he had inflicted on his victims, worried about his eternal soul."
It's most extraordinary how killing hundreds of thousands of an entire ethnic group is something one would actually boast about to praise in the ancient world.
Even Heinrich Himmler wanted to keep conduct the Final Solution as secretly as possible.
Caesar wasn't trying to commit genocide against all Celts, many of whom were already thoroughly Romanized (in Italy and Iberia and southern Gaul). He was trying to crush all possible resistance to Roman rule. William the Conqueror may have had regrets-- but a couple centuries later Genghis Khan had none.
Aren't we the odd ones in the history of world cultures?
In a way yes. Certainly in terms of "civilizations" above the hunter-gatherer level.
I also enjoyed it a lot. I always say that a bad adaptation can still be a great film in its own right and, for me, this was one of those cases. Sean Bean in Troy was a better Odysseus than Matt Damon was though. That said he’s also a better actor to be fair.
The biggest disappointment for me was actually the confrontation with the suitors. I assumed that, in lieu of his servants as in the poem, it would be the beggars who took the weapons and helped him kill all the suitors. But instead they get Damon to essentially do it alone. It just came off as quite tacky to me.
Wylfcen has cited a Steve Sailer post related to Odyssey!:
https://x.com/wylfcen/status/2079265871503958182
Another odyssey, that of Captain Cook in HM Bark ENDEAVOUR - the inspiration for Captain Kirk’s five year mission to explore strange new worlds in the USS ENTERPRISE - and then in HMS RESOLUTION also ended when the visitor outstayed his welcome - in the Sandwich Islands, sometimes known as “Hawaii”.
Did you see “The Return “. With Ralph Feinnes? Pretty great
No, but I certainly will after binging on Odyssey podcasts
I am a great admirer of Christopher Nolan. In the last six months I have watched Inception again, for the fifth time, this time at an IMAX, and revisited Interstellar. I was also deeply moved by Oppenheimer.
So I was surprised by how little The Odyssey affected me. It is visually stunning and technically remarkable, but I found it emotionally constricted. The famous incidents are there, but for me they never quite add up to a convincing sense of what the journey has done to Odysseus.
I found The Return, with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, much more moving. It is a much sparser film. There is less action and there are long stretches of silence, but the actors inhabit the anguish of loss and absence in a way I found far more immersive. You feel what twenty years have done to Odysseus and Penelope, and how difficult it is for them simply to be in the same world again.
I am planning to buy The Return on Blu ray and watch it again. I am not sure I will be returning to The Odyssey.
I have not seen the Nolan film yet. I have been bothered by the reviews and it sounds like it has been excessively modernized with language such as daddy versus father. I realize that no one but Greek scholars can read it in its native tongue but I have read some top translations and found them beautiful. The Return was excellent. The internal tension and grief and anger are very powerful
I won’t pay to watch it in the cinema out of principle (the obligatory diversity added so the film can Oscar) and so will have to wait until it streams cheaply.
For me, the diversity of the casting did not hinder my enjoyment of the film at all. Lupita Nyong’o was utterly convincing in the dual roles of Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra.
What did occasionally jar was some of the language modernisation, particularly Tom Holland’s Telemachus calling Odysseus “Daddy” rather than “Father”.
And my reservations about the film remain its relative its lack of emotional depth compared to The Return
Were the film a one off and not part of a system, I would likely tend to agree
As Bruce Raben already pointed out
Each to their own. I don’t get the principle thing. If it’s good it’s good and if not not. Who cares what the actors skin color is if they can act
Progressivism will likely end the West and on that basis I do think there’s a principle at stake.
"Stranger still is their religion. As portrayed in the epics, the gods are cruel and unbelievably petty, their relationship with the mortals entirely transactional. And as men create gods in their own image, the Greek warriors are also an unappealing bunch, in particular the domineering, arrogant Agamemnon and the psychotic Achilles. The only Greek I felt for was poor Ajax; he did his best, but the gods just hated him."
Nietzsche believed that the Hebrew God of the Old Testament was more realistic than Christ of the New Testament in the sense of being similar to the gods of the ancient world - that is to say an a**hole.
The gods of myth were the gods of the Greek religion-- but the Greek religion also included the mystery cults which engaged the worshiper on a much more personal level.