Putting The Em In They/them Since 1849

She has every right not to like Nolan's adaptation. But let's not pretend that her own adaptation of the poem isn't also filled with some pretty bold choices that other translators and adapations didn't make because they were focused on the parts of the story that moved them. Which is how it should be.

Nolan was never going to make her version of the poem - he made his version of the poem. And maybe it's not for you or for her and that's fine. But a 3000 year old poem that has been translated retranslated and told and retold over and over by scores of people over the centuries isn't some static ideal that Must Not Be Changed Because ~Reasons.

Everyone on this site acting like her version (or Epic or however you studied it) is some sacred text needs to truly sit all the way down. This is fandom. This is the purest form of fandom. What Nolan did is a transformative work. It's no different than a coffeeshop AU or a genderswap or "but what if they were fucking" or "here's that one line in the canon that I'm making the character's entire personality" or "okay but what if this happened instead this". It's just on a bigger scale than a fic on AO3.

And frankly, her op ep sounds not only cuntish as fuck, but it also drips with the sort of gleeful cruelty that I loathe to my very being. She doesn't own The Odyssey. Her ideas and what she finds important to the story aren't more valid than Nolan's. He just picked a different medium to tell his story, that's all. And the sooner everyone stops acting so precious about a story that was at least a few hundred years old by the time it was even written down, the better.

I mean if you just want to take, "There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible." This line makes me laugh every time I see it, it rules. And it has nothing to do with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026).

Presumably it's coming from the same complaint well as the majority of Wilson's piece: that while the Homeric poem is a celebration of fucking around and feasting, this movie is not. But in just saying, "it's not this" and nothing more, she's not discussing or even acknowledging how sex and food are actually used in this retelling. Both are tied together in what has been widely praised among audiences as one of the most indelible sequences: Samantha Morton's scene as the witch Circe. In it, the threat of sexual violence and act of eating are linked in a commentary on warmongering rapaciousness writ large, as a part of Nolan's intently laid out thesis of the Trojan horse as a kind of atomic bomb xenia violation whose nuclear winter the whole Mediterranean is now living under. And yes the food does look horrible, because it's horror food! It's difficult to describe in words, but it's like the stew Odysseus's men are eating is turning into gristly tentacles in their mouths, the sounds of their eating ghastly and so disgusting, while Morton transforms them through....something I will not even try to describe, I've just never seen anything quite like it onscreen. Largely practical effects too, astonishing.

Not a bit of that is in that line, of course. Great line, but isn't about the movie, it's about the author.

And honestly, the author is a bit out on a limb with much of how she has actually interpreted The Odyssey (film) itself, must also be said! And not just by me, or by film critics naturally, but also other classics scholars:

I mean when early on she summarily defined the work of cinema as "light and noise" and moved on, it was pretty clear that Wilson just doesn't have a ton of respect or feeling for epic scale movies in general. Which is fine! Everyone has types of art that they don't jibe with. But you don't go to the person who's not keen on dance for a good assessment of the new ballet, negative or positive.

2023 my parents kicked me out due to my transness, and you all helped me survive that back then! one more time please? (link to that post for proof)

help a black tgirl out?? you all have before.

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