Here I am

First, a few words about what I am not going to do here. I'm not going to catalogue all of the ways that Nolan diverges from the source material and make a case why that's a bad thing. As I mentioned in the post I made on this blog a few days ago, I think it's essential when dealing with adaptations of ancient texts and especially the Homeric epics to keep in mind that the text in the form we have it, as well as the cultural meaning that it carries, is itself a construction of a ~2700 year reception tradition, and does not inherently have some sacred primacy. An adaptation is not necessarily "bad" and does not necessarily "misunderstand" the source material simply because it diverges from it. Neither O Brother, Where Art Thou? nor Derek Walcott's Omeros (both of which are much better Odyssey adaptations than this one) is especially faithful to the source text, and a lot of their power comes from the willingness to engage in a conversation with the source material rather than follow it to the letter.

Now that's out of the way, let me say that on every level but technical this is a terrible film. It's terrible not just as an Odyssey adaptation - although it certainly is that - but because of its own failings.

I'll start with what I believe the film is about, which is a white male American Christian war veteran on a long journey home haunted by guilt for the war crimes he committed overseas against a populace that mostly remains faceless. This is not a joke - it's my best attempt to make sense of the moral universe of the film, in which Homeric/archaic Greek religious concepts like xenia have been replaced with "Zeus's law" (Christianized as the Golden Rule) but also in which Odysseus fears that by devising the Trojan Horse, he has essentially caused the Fall of Man via the breakdown of "Zeus's law." Alissa Wilkinson writing for the NY Times and plenty of others have noted that the film is thematically a companion piece to Oppenheimer, but that might actually be underselling the extent to which Damon-as-Odysseus might as well be Oppenheimer. It's ancient Greek dressing on a story that makes no real sense outside of a 20th-21st century American Christian framework, a point that is uncomfortably driven home in a scene in which Odysseus' comrades tell an elderly man who does not speak their language that "we're Greeks. from Ithaca" in the film's koine of burly American-accented English as his village burns. Of course, the elderly man who has just lost everything is speaking Modern Greek - a hell of a metaphor for the way in which this film is so deeply assured in its rewriting of the Achaeans as Americans and its claiming of the ancient Mediterranean world as terra nullius for an American-war-veteran-going-home story, an ethos that also seems to have pervaded the filming process.

There are, of course, other consequences to the portrayal of Odysseus as a proto-Christian war veteran haunted by guilt and PTSD. My lovely mutual Mal ( @gaius-sempronius-grackle) points out in this review that Nolan clearly wants to be adapting the Aeneid, an observation I completely agree with, and the Odysseus we get is far more pius than polytropos. But there's also not a single character in the entire film that is polytropos or even seems to show much hint of complexity. Excellent actors like Lupita Nyong'o and Elliot Page are wasted in poorly-scripted roles that give them nothing to work with, and Penelope is not the complex, tactically-minded woman of the Odyssey but an utterly one note character. Tom Holland's Telemachus likewise doesn't really do much of anything, because no one in this film does except for Matt Damon.

Emily Wilson's review also points out another crucial issue with the film - its complete sexlessness. The removal of any material from Books 23 and 24 from the film means that we don't get any real emotional resolution to Odysseus and Penelope's arc - much has been said about whether and when sex scenes are "necessary" (a framing I mostly reject), but it's hard to argue that there's a more necessary sex scene in all of ancient literature than the one in Odyssey 23. But we also have no sex between Odysseus and Calypso (who, because she's not a goddess, puzzlingly just seems to be a woman living alone on an island who feeds lotus to passers-by) or Odysseus and Circe. At the same time, for a movie that seems to be extraordinarily keyed into a certain aesthetic of male homosociality, we don't even get any spark of eroticism or emotional connection between men, either. In fact, from this blogger's perspective as a bisexual man, it's striking that a movie with this many sweaty men manages to feel this utterly sterile, sexless, and uninterested in the human body and embodied experience.

This all brings me to one of the few moments that bizarrely enough does work, which is the Circe scene. Mostly this is because of Samantha Morton's performance, but the actual portrayal of the transformation of Odysseus' men into pigs is notable both as one of the most unnerving things I've seen in a recent film (and most of the cinema I watch is horror!) and as a bizarrely erotic scene. It's one of very few moments where you actually feel the uncannyness of the Odyssey's apologue, and one of few moments where the lack of faithfulness to the source material actually seems generative (side note: if you are at all sensitive to emetophobic triggers or body horror, I would recommend fully walking out of the theater for this scene). The Polyphemus scene is similarly unnerving, with creature design that reminded me quite a bit of the Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth, although it's held back by its refusal to sit with the implications of Odysseus and his companions' violation of xenia and (ok, I said I wouldn't list infidelities as flaws but just this once) its decision to make Polyphemus incoherent rather than allowing one of the most famous exchanges in the poem to play out.

The Zeus’ law thing was cringey, especially boiling it down to people might be gods themselves instead of just being a proper host and visitor, but I guess they figured the law of hospitality might be lost on modern US movie goers.

And I actually liked a lot of the horribly inaccurate costumes because I’m trash. Except for the Laestrygonians, but honestly if I sit with it long enough it’s probably in the so bad it’s good category.

Your uncle Bilbo has vanished, leaving everything he owned to you. That includes Bag End... and the One Ring, hidden somewhere inside. But the Ring's power is having a strange effect: the rooms are not quite as you remember them, and the floor plan changes every day...

This is a fan-made game for the Lord of the Rings Musical Ephemera Extravaganza!

Set in the world of The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale, with gameplay mechanics inspired by the game Blue Prince. Made as a collaboration between Cici (@mischieffoal) and Mo (@lotrmusicalmusical) for the 2026 Watermill anniversary.

I do too. But it lives its whole life. So you have to take it seriously eventually, right? And be respectful and shit.

For BOTW, the main question you ask from the start is "Who am I?" and also "What happened to Hyrule?" You learn the answers to these questions over time as you journey across the land and remember things about your past. The answer to "who am I" is "I am the chosen hero," and the answer to "what happened" is "We failed to save everyone." When you learn that, the goal changes from "go and do the quests because the old lady said to" to "Do what you couldn't do back then and save everyone."

In TOTK, the question is "Where the heck is Zelda?" and it's not your question, it's everyone else's. All the NPCs want to know where she is and you're just kind of standing there while everyone discusses it. And then the game throws you an early game side quest where they tell you exactly what happened to Zelda, and then you just have to putter around for 99 years and watch everyone run blindly towards Fake Zelda while you just follow them without saying anything until the final hour.

And then they force you to listen to the exact same spiel about the Imprisoning War, 4 separate times, without changing a single word. Whereas in BOTW, you get to learn about the Champions and who they were and their relationship to you, and explain the Calamity to you in one cutscene.

Plus, they don't expand on anything from BOTW in TOTK. Link and Zelda are just living perfectly fine in society despite having basically been dead for a century. And instead of expanding on the Sheika mythos, they just try and pretend they never existed and put the Zonai in their place as the Ancient Precursor Race with all the Ancient Technology That's Been Lost To Time.

BOTW is ultimately about grief, remembrance, and life continuing despite what was lost. As we explore Hyrule, we get to see the devastated ruins from the Calamity and learn about how the survivors pay tribute to their fallen and work to pick up the pieces. We get to see exactly how this unspeakable loss affected each of the different cultures, how the sudden reawakening of the Beasts is bringing it all back, and help them navigate through it all as the Hero. When you play as Link in BOTW, you feel the tranquil grief everywhere as you wander the world. It's the beating heart of the game.

TOTK is about... not really anything at all. Friendship, maybe? Uniting under a common goal? The bulk of the story is Zelda's flashbacks, and those ancient events are just about Rauru wanting to be the king of a unified Hyrule and Ganondorf resisting. And since Rauru is depicted as the hero, I can only assume this is meant to be the theme? It carries through into the Modern Era in a sense, with the flags of each of the cultures being raised in Lookout Point once you complete their quests, but it lacks any and all soul. We don't get any introspection into how all the races felt about this unionization in the ancient era, and in the modern era we're already on good terms with everyone and they're on board as soon as their people aren't at death's door. It just doesn't feel like anything, unlike BOTW's Beast quests were you got to learn about the civilizations, their histories, and how the Calamity affected them in particular.

TOTK has so, so much, but there's no thread connecting it all and it just leaves it feeling busy. The lack of a core identity is at the heart of all it's issues, because if you assign it something it gets way easier to sort it's narrative into something that makes sense.

For example, to pair it with BOTW's theme of life continuing after loss, let's make it about the perseverance of life through tragedy by focusing on the tragedies hitting all the civilizations in TOTK. With this core, we can go back to the Ancient Era and have what drove Rauru to unify the races be terrible tragedies wearing down each culture like they are in the Modern Era. Rauru decides that the only way everyone can survive is through pooling their resources and using their separate strengths to cover for the other's weaknesses, but Ganondorf opposes and thinks the only way the Gerudo will survive is if they keep their resources to themselves. Boom, now we have compelling motives for the two groups that keep the main conflict intact. Carrying this through into the Modern Era, the sage flashbacks can be about their people's separate blights and how joining together solved the problem, which ties it in to the modern Sages pledging allegiance to Link. Now it feels a lot less like the Sages doing so because the narrative demands it, and more so like they're listening to the wisdom of their ancient counterparts.

This also fixes the Zelda Problem. Let's scrap the mystery of it--what you identified as the core question of TOTK--and focus on the tragedy. How is Zelda's disappearance affecting the Hyruleans? How's it affecting the rebuilding efforts, diplomacy between the civilizations in this era of unease, the day-to-day of those in Hateno after she so thoroughly integrated herself into their lives? How can she be haunting the narrative instead of being some mcguffin to search for?

Also, slightly unrelated, but I think having Zelda's memories be locked behind Puppet Zelda fights instead of having them be just thrown on the ground around the world would make them way more cohesive story wise. Instead of the current loop of Link hearing about a Zelda appearance, not telling the quest giver that he knows what happened to her, and then going to fight the phantom just to report back like "yeah lmao not zelda" it could go like Link hearing about an appearance, letting the quest giver know right away that that isn't Zelda and then seeking it out to get another piece of the puzzle as to what exactly she went through in the Ancient Era. Just makes the effort more worthwhile.

Homer’s Iliad, the first one hundred lines in Mycenaean Greek and Linear B:

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