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i don't mind changes to the original myths, as long as they make sense and they have a narrative purpose! i understand that making changes is sometimes necessary to convey a certain narrative, especially to modern audiences.

is epic the musical mythologically accurate? hell no! but the changes serve to tell a specific story and to convey a certain message. also, epic the musical is self aware about its "inaccuracies". and the music just bangs.

is hadestown accurate? no! does it make the change that I always dread, removing the kidnapping from the hades/persephone myth? yeah. but hadestown is barely about them, and it uses greek mythology as a "narrative frame" to tell a certain story. it has a point. it has a message.

what are stories like lore olympus trying to say? what is the messagge of the hundredth persephone/hades retelling? what are we supposed to take from them? "don't listen to your mother she's a bitch"? "mothers are irrational and you should forsake her for a man"? very feminist.

why are we still doing the medusa "feminist" retellings? it's BEEN done. too many times. and they're ALL the same. it's a worse crime than being bad: they are boring.

i'm tired of retellings that are just "what if this very famous story was THE OPPOSITE and the protagonist was an ASSHOLE the whole time and the villain was MISUNDERSTOOD and the real VICTIM" okay but why. why would that be the case. what's the point of the story you want to tell. or do you just want to use shock value.

of course, i dislike retellings that are so different from the myth that they go AGAINST the spirit/message of the original, because in that case what's even the point of retelling the myth? just tell an original story. but i would take stabbed poseidon and capitalist hades any day over the same basic story of medusa being a girlboss or demeter being bad because of... reasons?

I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

Achilles: How could Heracles not recognize his wife?

Chiron: That is the nature of madness.

Nolan made decisions that I cannot call either good or bad — they are STRANGE. Truly strange.

• The gods were cut out, leaving only Athena, but at the same time the film still includes Polyphemus, Circe and her magical tricks, Scylla, and Charybdis. So the gods are removed, but all kinds of mythical creatures remain. I don't understand this. Are you making a film with a realistic approach or are you not? By what principle do you decide which unrealistic things to keep and which to remove?

• It is claimed that the film gives more screen time to women than Homer does, but at the same time many female characters from Homer's Odyssey have been cut out, and Athena's influence on Odysseus has been reduced to a guilty conscience. (Let me remind you: Athena is, first and foremost, the strategic goddess of war and wisdom. Her domain is strategy, planning moves, helping and guiding heroes, not guilty conscience. Other gods were responsible for the so-called spiritual catharsis, including Apollo.)

• This is historically accurate, but that historical accuracy only applies to the music, Travis Scott, and the statement at the end of the film that this is the Bronze Age. As for the clothing, the way people speak, the ships, and the armor — that's where the historical accuracy ends. I showed Agamemnon's armor to my mother, who isn't even interested in Greek culture or mythology. I asked her if he looked Greek. She answered: definitely not. And when I showed her that famous shot of Menelaus and Telemachus, we both thought they were wearing hoodies. It doesn't resemble the clothing of Classical Greece, Archaic fashion, or even Mycenaean Greece (which is precisely the period in which Odysseus lived). Even the color palette is just... resting. Do you really think Greece was and is this grey and gloomy? And not only Greece, but the other countries as well. Nolan treats historical accuracy very selectively.

• As I said, many characters were cut, but instead they inserted Clytemnestra, who looks like Helen's identical twin, the warrior Sinon (who isn't in either the Iliad or the Odyssey at all), and also included that scene where Menelaus injures Helen and says that disgusting, humiliating line to her. And here I just don't understand. Considering the skin color of Helen and Menelaus (both of them, not only Helen but Menelaus too), what exactly am I supposed to see here? Everyone who disagrees with the casting is called racist. But then WHAT IS THIS?! The film tells me that I should see Menelaus and Helen, but I don't. I see a white man named Menelaus deliberately abusing a Black woman named Helen and humiliating her. Unfortunately, I see a subtle allusion to exactly what Hollywood nowadays claims to hate. (The criticism here is not about the casting or the actors' physical appearance. It is specifically about the director's decision to include this scene.) We could have seen Menelaus as loving, caring — or at the very least as the man who wanted to kill Helen but dropped his sword because he couldn't resist her beauty. We could have seen that wonderful scene performed by Jon Bernthal and Lupita Nyong'o. As a rule, when changes are made, there should be an understanding of why. What exactly am I supposed to understand from this scene? That Menelaus is an asshole toward his wife? That he's a wonderful uncle but a terrible husband? That Helen was right to run away to Troy with Paris and had good reasons not to love Menelaus? What exactly is this scene trying to tell me?

• Important, even if episodic, characters have been removed. Achilles, for example. Why am I focusing on him? Because he uttered words that are still relevant today, words that are iconic and mean so much: "I would rather be the slave of a poor man than the king over the dead." Achilles did not have a major role in Homer's Odyssey, but those words are still among the most significant in literature. They have enormous significance on their own, but they become even more significant because they are spoken by Achilles himself. Another person could have said them and they still would have mattered, but it is Achilles who says them, and we know his biography and the path he went through. The fact that someone like Achilles says such words is extremely significant. But in this film Achilles has been replaced by Sinon. I don't know whether Sinon says these words in the film, but coming from him they will never carry the same weight they do when spoken by Achilles.