Get fucked. It won't make you any more tolerable but at least you'll be someone else's problem for a while.
Okay, fine, I'll lay out in exhaustive detail why Emily Wilson is a jackass.
She starts off her review with things Chris (his friends call him Chris) Nolan does in every movie, ig, idk, I've only ever seen his first two Batmen. This is, on it's face, a fair enough criticism, although I think it's presumptious to assume everyone watching The Odyssey has seen every Chris Nolan movie and is exactly as exhausted with his tropes as everyone who's apparently seen every film of his in spite of their supposed monotony.
As part of her rundown of Chris's tropes, she lists "survival portrayed as a kind of triumph" and "long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning."
It's a CinemaSin that Chris Nolan has included "survival portrayed as a kind of triumph" and "drowning" in
With how much Chris has been accused of "missing the point" and cutting out such unforgettable moments as a dumb pun absolutely no one was attached to until a couple of weeks ago, the film being penalized for those things is like booing a movie about Pompeii featuring a volcano.
It is really not that much of an action movie until like, the last half hour. Trying to frame it as a Michael Bay movie is ridiculous.
The Sirens are barely visible and if she has a problem with them being "ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks" instead of bird women she should maybe take it up with every single modern depiction of the Sirens ever.
If she really saw the film this is a bizarre lie. I don't even know how to rebut it. She's just plain wrong, there were plenty of quiet moments, this wasn't The Fast & the Fucking Furious 26, Emily Wilson what the fuck are you talking about?
This is, as I've said, a very silly thing for an academic authority on The Odyssey to say, because the meaning of "wine-dark" is famously lost to us! No one knows what the fuck the ancient Greeks meant when they called something "wine-dark." There is certainly not a consensus it meant "purple."
IDK how to tell her this, but yeah, it's a fucking fantasy film, it's a people with swords fight monsters and witches cast spells movie, did she want them to be wearing brightly colored spandex and shooting each other with laser beams? I need her to define her idea of not-looking-like-LotR.
I'm about to get into this but right away I wanna say: shut the fuck up, White lady. I'm glad you've determined the representation is completely useless. Good for you, White girl.
So there's no point to representation if the protagonist is White, in which case all PoC roles are merely "the Black best friend."
What the hell was she expecting from either of these two? Should Helen have been a warrior-queen who storms Ithica, kills all the suitors, and takes Penelope for herself? Don't answer that, I've already convinced myself it'd be great, but somehow I get the feeling Wilson would find a way to complain about it.
Clytemnestra is given significantly more sympathy than the Greeks ever gave her. And Helen? The idea that she wouldn't be an abused wife in anything resembling reality is absurd. Menelaus's reputation as a "wife guy" is entirely because the original narrative is a product of an era where women were considered property and so describes the two of them being all smiles following their return from Troy in a way that's downright cartoonish if you think about it for five seconds.
So, yeah, Helen is an abused wife. Although I wouldn't call her a "repentant adulteress" in the movie. That's certainly what she is in the poem, but in the movie the only sign of penance she displays is begging Telemachus to give her apologies to Penelope. She doesn't regret cheating her husband, she blames herself for all the consequences.
"Calypso is better in the poem because if you know enough of the background lore you know her hysterical outrage at a pantheon of rapists has some minor nitpicks, and the word I will use to describe that is comical."
Penelope yearns for Odysseus because...they're husband and wife? They had a child together? What, should the movie have shown their first fucking date? Penelope is not a very active force! Her whole role in the narrative is holding down the fort!
I just don't have the words for this. How does Emily Wilson, translator of ancient Greek texts, think Greek religion worked? When someone got hit by a lightning bolt, does she imagine Zeus coming down and saying "hey, that was me, could you toss it back"? Obviously they appeared in myths and the original stories, but yes, generally speaking, things like that were taken as being the result of the gods being angry or pleased, just like every other religion in the history of human civilization given that gods aren't fucking real!
Yeah, this movie about PTSD and the breakdown of civilization when people stop following the rules really needed a subplot where the hero tells a princess stories about how cool war was.
Yeah, because the original poem doesn't do that, for sure. This translator of ancient epic poetry is utterly baffled by the subjects acting like the world is smaller than it is.
Putting this in the "evidence Emily Wilson has never seen a film before" folder, because she seems to think a movie should either be all Shakespeare or all Tarantino with zero middle ground. What the fuck is context?
What a weirdly mean thing to say after one of the world's most popular directors gave your book a shout out.
Odysseus does outwit the Cyclops with the fake wool trick, so once again she's lying or didn't see the film, but the complaint about the giant having "no wits" is very funny right after complaining that he's not depicted as the victim of an Abbot & Costello routine.
It's so weird to see someone put down an adaption of The Odyssey for depicting famous wife guy Odysseus as not cheating on his wife while expecting her to remain completely chaste long past the point he should have been accepted as dead. Apparently the real point of The Odyssey was Odysseus fucking his way through the Mediterranean.
"Why does not telling Sinon he'd die matter if he'd die anyway? And why doesn't Sinon simply look into the future to see that the thing he wants to help with will be bad?"
Does Emily Wilson not agree with that? What's with the marks around 'we' not liking xenophobia, the War on Terror, and Brexit?
God, there's still so much left. There's so much left, Jesus fuck. Part 2 to come later.
