No, it’s NOT a good retelling of The Odyssey. Nolan and company desiccated a lavish poem and made a too-noisy, battle-centric, another-closeup-on-a-beardy-face, but skip-any-powerful-women film. It’s pretty. Pretty is not good. Stop reading if you don’t want spoilers. Like the lettuce diarrhea, if I don’t get this out, I shall explode.
The poem called The Odyssey has been in my life a long time. Read most of it in Greek as a youngster, and all of it in English several times. Recently I enjoyed Emily Wilson’s contemporary translation. It’s a great way to experience The Odyssey. If the movie moved you, go read her translation. The audio book is read by Claire Danes, 10/10 would recommend.
Onto the film.
Matt Damon was a poor choice. There is a ton of trickery (that backfires) in Odysseus and there was z e r o trickery in Damon. He didn’t even seem clever, despite being able to string a bow and shoot well. Partly the script and partly performance, he is not a hero.
The entire story is unsexed and that is no bueno. Calypso and Odysseus were banging for 7 years. Circe and Odysseus were banging for a year. Penelope knows Odysseus by the bed he carved right before they bang. There was no banging and there could have been lots of banging. Have ya seen the cast?
The women are diminished to an extreme extent, which is my biggest disappointment. Females are perfectly dominant in the poem, guiding, rescuing, caring, cunning, and richly woven into the story. They’re almost all boringly third-fiddle in the film. Athena has mostly glances, without the Mentes and Mentor bits. Calypso’s “remember-don’t remember-remember” was all wrong (I’ll get to that in a moment), and Circe, the brilliant Samantha Morton, has probably the best scene of the entire film (men to pigs). Yet she was super condensed in time. With no banging.
Where was Zeus? Where the hell was Hermes? Hermes plays a strong part in the poem. Poseidon and the Anemoi? These are all epic characters that, even if only given seconds on screen, propel the poem forward.
Where was the bag of winds? If anyone could have given us a bag of winds, Nolan could have done so.
The film was too damn loud. You could barely hear Tiresias’ prophecy to Odysseus, telling him to prevent his men from eating the sacred cows. There were too many loud and weird sounds in Oceanus during that scene. AND YET, when they sail past the land of the sirens, you can’t hear them because we, the audience, have our ears plugged. For a film that makes a hell of a racket, it was another poor choice. I would have loved to hear the sirens eerie singing and sexy whispering to Odysseus as he was bound to the ship’s mast. But again, this is a sexy story, unsexed.
In the poem, when we first meet Odysseus solo, in the water after losing all his men because they ate the wrong cows, Ino (a fabulously-ankled sea nymph) rescues him to the land of the Phaeacians, where Nausicaä and her parents Arete and Alcinous care for and listen to Odysseus as he recounts the lavish tale. All this was cut, so Calypso had to (poorly) do the flashback work. If she used the word remember one more time…
The land of the Lotophagi (lotus-eaters) was not related to Calypso. Odysseus rescuing his men from the lotus-eaters could have been an epic scene, quite relevant to today…
Polyphemus should have talked. Odysseus got him drunk in the poem and, when asked, said his name was Nobody, to which Polyphemus said “I’ll eat nobody last!” The drunken giant falls asleep, so that when he was stabbed in the eye, Polyphemus gropes his way to his door, opens it, and yells to the other giants “Nobody is killing me!” to which they basically laugh at and ignore. Why no talking giants? Boo.
If you can’t tell, I’m heaving with disappointment. Removing the strong women and removing the sex were major blunders. Too loud when it could have been quieter, and quiet when it could have been louder, all I can suggest is to go read the poem. It’s so fabulous. This film is not.