You know, I also want to contribute my thoughts about Nolan's Odyssey and really say everything I think.I think there are no such things as "right" or "wrong" reasons for someone to hate this newly released film. Everyone decides for themselves what is right and what is wrong. However, a person who REALLY cares will be able to get to the core of the matter and draw the right conclusions for themselves. And they will understand why there are people who criticize Odyssey SO strongly.
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.
I get the impression that the film is trying to be the Odyssey, it is even called that, but it is not the Odyssey that has been known for around 2,700 years (if I'm wrong about the number, feel free to correct me!). And yes, it feels as though both the film and Nolan are trying to sit on two chairs at the same time.
