with a few exceptions, every decision seemed to reflect a real & sincere understanding of the odyssey as such. i personally think christopher nolan is kind of annoying, but given the fact that it was always going to reflect his sensibilities, i thought it was basically ideal. excellent visual spectacle, especially beautiful islands, fortresses on hills, grassy meadows, firelit feasting halls, etc. loved the trees in between troy's urban center and the outer wall, that's a nice touch.
i was thinking about what it means for nolan to be the most reddit-brained guy who can raise one gazillion dollars to make a movie like this, bc his understanding of the bronze age collapse as a bunch of guys standing around and saying "the bronze age is collapsing, the sea peoples are destroying cities, and pretty soon people are going to stop being able to read and write, they'll only remember these events through semi-legendary oral poetry" is basically the take you would have if your basic opinion on the matter is informed by a bunch of anonymous midwits on the internet learning from each other's posts, ie, reddit (and also tumblr, but he doesn't have tumblr vibes).
it's still weird how a guy who hates jokes and levity made a completely self-serious trilogy about batman, the campiest imaginable media property. likewise, odysseus has no sense of humor, no charisma, and no wit, in a story famously full of clever jokes and tricks. he doesn't do the "my name is nobody" thing with polyphemus, he only tells one lie about his identity instead of many, etc. matt damon plays him like he would play the midwestern protagonist of a movie about the iraq war, which this kind of is (also gaza, maybe): stoic, laconic, traumatized by violence in which he takes very little part on screen, etc.
likewise, he's not the first guy to do euhemerism to homer (euhomerism), but he does take an extremely reddit-atheist-esque tack of presenting a series of events that, i guess with the exception of polyphemus, scylla, and the fact that those armor guys were really tall in some shots but not others, broadly could have happened in "real life". and then he tells you, in so many words, that later on there's gonna be an oral tradition that makes these events more fantastical in the retelling. athena is the only god that appears on screen (there's an eye-winking line about whether calypso is a god or not, but as far as this movie is concerned, she isn't, circe is given her powers by the gods but not a god herself, etc), and even she doesn't really break the Cold Hard Rationalist suspension of disbelief bc several shots establish that only odysseus can see her, so she's essentially filling the role of the quintessential nolan "specter of dead and/or absent wife", bc in this case he's the one who, from his wife's perspective, is absent and possibly dead. also athena is a very explicit and literal symbol for his wife, who is technically also absent from him. did i mention that he says at least five variations on "coming home is always difficult. some homecomings are better than others. the term nostos, plural nostoi, is ancient greek for homecoming, and in the odyssey by homer.."
relatedly, bc everyone speaks the minimum number of words possible, a hilarious amount of the dialogue is them literally just explaining the themes without any elaboration. whatever the original screenplay looked like, they seem to have run it through several million iterations of "ok, now imagine making this even clearer to an even dumber guy." at one point matt damon very seriously intones what sounds like a joke about bad dialogue, it's something like "..and what you most can't have, is what you used to have". meta-textually, he's already writing dialogue for a post-literate audience to take in orally.
as for casting, costumes, general visuals, etc, it was always going to involve some degree of interpretation. there's literally no way to turn the odyssey as is into a movie without changing something fundamental about it. that was also true for athenian playwrights adapting the story into a two-hour stage play. he definitely opts for depicting "how the median american would understand X" rather than "how the text depicts X" or "how the greeks would have described X".
so in a literal sense, they cut entire chunks out of the story (notably nestor & the phaeacians) and condense plot elements (he tells his stories to calypso, who feeds him lotus, like helen drugs menelaus, bc he needs those two to be completely different). he also fiddles with the timeline, like odysseus going in person to foil the suitors' plot against telemachus, which i think is unremarkable except that it provides a good euphemism (profaning athena's temple by spilling blood, then setting a fire) for the thing they refer to but take pains not to depict or mention, which is ajax the lesser raping cassandra in athena's temple.
this is extremely important bc (as noted in that reblog) zendaya as athena is a trojan woman who they take into athena's temple during the sack of troy. (one of the explicitly stated themes, several times, is "a stranger may be a god in disguise". extremely literal, as expected.) i think they kill her, but maybe it's implied that she's cassandra. either way, the "rape" is replaced by cutting off the head of the statue of athena. i'm sure the greeks would appreciate it as a metaphorical substitution ("maidenhead") for the original crime against that same statue. the thing that bugs me about it is that it's the exact same thing brad pitt achilles did in troy (2004), which i feel is anachronistic in either case, but i'm not an expert on what the greeks actually did with divine images.
i kept seeing pictures of bald + bearded jon bernthal, and i had no idea he was gonna be Asshole Menelaus. (i liked when shaving his head symbolized becoming evil in walking dead. s/o to s2 of walking dead in particular.) obv the threat that he was going to kill helen was always present, and a lot of adaptations make him cold & relentless. and as noted, they give helen's drugs to calypso (as lotus) so that, instead of menelaus being friendly & welcoming but ultimately dulled (possibly into submission) by an active helen, he's actively abrasive to everyone, even his guests, even via his servants, smacking and shoving helen around and, notably, scarring her face. he makes a joke like "more like 500 ships now", which does feel like a thing nolan would've read about in honor cultures that place a monetary value on the face as the site of honor & reputation (i know medieval ireland did, and kurds talk about honor with "face" terminology just like english, so it may be an indo-european thing). it's thematically fitting: menelaus lost his brother (who notably has no face), helen lost her twin sister (also played by lupita nyong'o), etc. does it raise uncomfortable questions about how black characters seem to be brutalized first & most often (zendaya, first suitor odysseus shoots, etc)? also yes.
agamemnon is great as the black specter of death. it was weird when the preview came out and everyone was like "what's with his Grimdark Batman helmet and its golden vertebrae?" and the answer is that agamemnon is the black specter of death. (kind of like mozart's dad's mask in "amadeus", except even more literal.) we never see his face, he's always wearing the batman helmet, and every time he appears he very straightforwardly symbolizes death and destruction. again, if this was ever subtle at some point in the editing process, it gradually got less so over time. i really love what we saw of his homecoming, if there was ever more of it, it was cut down to maybe ten seconds of screentime, but it was perfect for what it needed to be.
i think the suitor plot is where it hews closest to the thematic vibes of the original story. it takes pains to point out that antinous is not only a bad guest but also a coward, doing a reverse katniss to his shepherd to avoid going to war. (note 1: my grandpa actually did this to his brother during the vietnam war. he wrote his brother's name on his draft card and his brother got drafted in his place.) (note 2: cool how elliot page's character is apparently played by a cis boy as a kid, and how he is very explicitly established as a True Man in opposition to rpats' cowardice.) the suitors have to be Bad in the nietzschean sense (ie, cowards, the opposite of warrior aristocrats) in addition to selfish and exploitative, as the ultimate antithesis of aristocratic virtue. likewise, eumaeus is the ultimate loyal slave, the perfect counterpart to odysseus, the perfect master. it is wack to maintain this kind of uncut aristocratic propaganda in a movie in 2026, but it's baked into the text. we mercifully only get one slave girl (implied to be) killed (mia goth as melantho. my take on mia goth is that i liked her in "pearl" and in all her other roles she's just pretty good). ultimately the fighting ends when all the survivors kneel, as eumaeus predicted. odysseus tells telemachus not to fight them, to avoid incurring a blood debt, but he does anyway, and presumably he rules over the survivors afterwards.
on the other hand, the thing most often pointed out as the thematic departure from the original is odysseus feeling guilt and/or being traumatized about having sacked & destroyed troy (myself included, the other day). i actually think he handled this part well. like i said, we don't actually see odysseus doing anything especially heinous on screen. astyanax isn't in the odyssey, and obv it would make him a lot less likeable, so it's not surprising that we don't see it here. as the other person noted, we don't even really see him killing that many people while he's actively sacking troy. he's mostly standing around watching all the other greeks rape & pillage as burning towers fall down, etc.
related to what i was posting about earlier, i think the odyssey as such didn't really have an understanding of PTSD as such, and it doesn't really depict him feeling guilty for it. i would argue (agreeing with jonathan shay) that the poem absolutely does show how years of war & raiding incentivized him to lie, kill, steal, & refuse to trust anyone, all traits which end up damaging his ability to reintegrate into peaceful society, which is why he lies to everyone he loves and kills a hundred of his own subjects. everyone is arguing whether or not, or to what degree, the poem's odysseus would feel Guilty for his role in troy, rather than experiencing specific punishments for specific offenses against the gods & their relatives & images, etc, in a war that could have ended in comparable bloodshed without offending the gods and the characters' own senses of morality. all that is above my paygrade.
in its modern context, troy here represents the wanton destruction that heralds the collapse of Our Civilization, very literally. they say many times in so many words that opening the gates of troy (letting in the black specter of death, ie agamemnon, standing in front of the greeks as they open the gates) and sacking troy literally, directly, causes the collapse of the Late Bronze Age via the sea peoples. on the one hand, it is very funny to skim the wikipedia page for "sea peoples" and then incorporate that tout court into your homer adaptation. on another hand, one of odysseus' cretan lies is about doing sea people shit to egypt, and the original audience would have understood the poem as part of a larger legendary tradition where most of these royal dynasties would be destroyed or replaced, which i think likely corresponded at least in part to some of the actual ruins of bronze age palace complexes (mycenae, pylos, gla, orchomenos, etc). so it's not totally foreign to the text, even if it is silly to keep calling them "peoples from the sea".
also, in the context of all the other plays about the trojan cycle (iphigenia, the oresteia, the trojan women, etc), it is absolutely true that, at least by the 5th c BCE, sacking & pillaging troy was seen to have caused the destruction of their own world. that's explicitly true for agamemnon, and later texts would add astyanax, ajax & cassandra (and the furies!), etc. i think it's totally fair to have odysseus say "by destroying troy, we were destroying our own households", bc the odyssey does show that literally happening in several cases.
so, given that literally everyone seems to have picked up on the theme that Our Civilization (presumably america, maybe The West) is collapsing, what is troy? what is the wanton destruction with which we brought about our own collapse? knowing that nolan is the kind of squishy centrist lib who takes twenty years to concede to basic reality, it could be iraq, but given that we're almost three years out from the start of the gaza genocide, it may well be gaza. there's certainly a lot of imagery of burning towers crumbling & falling down, which again could be sublimated 9/11 imagery ("the dark knight" was nolan dickriding bush & the patriot act, which is weird). but since they keep talking about the sack of troy as the civilization-ending atrocity that transformed them into barbarians (sea peoples, as intoned extremely literally at the climax of the story), the ultimate violation of the laws of man and god which ultimately heralded the destruction of their entire world order, it's gotta be gaza, right?
speaking of which: i know tiresias tells odysseus to go inland to make an offering. i'm pretty sure there's no indication that odysseus goes into permanent exile in the poem, right? i'm pretty sure the idea that he's going to sail west is new to the movie. if anything it smacks of the end of lord of the rings more than the blessed isles, and of course metatextually it's the most american thing imaginable. what better for grim, taciturn, emotionally stunted, boston irish-american odysseus than to resolve his identity crisis by heading west into the unknown?
maybe most importantly, it's a movie that feels like a movie! it understood the assignment, you could do a lot worse.
stormborns
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