something i find really interesting about (some) people who don't write is the way they'll elevate plot over execution? it's the way you'll sometimes see people who think they have a best-selling book idea, and they want someone to write it for them while thinking they should get the lion's share of the imaginary profits, because it's their idea. and don't get me wrong, ideas are important! plots are important!
but there are so many stories i've read over the years that could be summarized into a few sentences of bland-sounding plot, and it's the execution that matters. it's the writing. it's the writing!
a talented writer can turn a bland plot into a story you want to devour. and someone who only cares about ideas can take the most interesting idea ever conceived and make it unreadable/unwatchable.
like it does feel like there are a Lot of people in this world who don't view writing as a skill that deserves respect, and who think that really it's all about coming up with shiny ideas. and it does feel like that's uhhh infected a LOT of different things in the modern world. tbh.
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the fact that on my way out of seeing the hadestown proshot with my sibling i was walking to the theater exit and without even thinking about it i turned around to see where they were... yeah. yeah.
like. you can be frustrated at orpheus. you can be heartbroken for orpheus and eurydice. you should be. but when you're walking together and your loved one isn't right next to you that instinct to turn around and check on them is as natural as breathing
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i loved the opening in ithaca, unabashedly (and i love THAT the film opens in ithaca, being who i am). travis scott as the bard is captivating. penelope's entrance was literally showstopping, as she also does in the poem.
anne hathaway was the strongest performance by far. don't think there was a penelope scene that didn't hit for me. the use of the screen in the great hall and the loom as shields showed her isolation and opacity while letting her also be present for the action.
eumaeus & eurylochus are the standouts of the supporting cast.
the scenery looked a lot better than i feared from the trailers; circe's island was my favorite set/location.
i liked the pacing, broadly speaking. i saw it with two people with no background knowledge and neither were bored or thought it dragged, for the length. any feature film even at 3 hours was always going to be a brutal struggle for adapting epic poetry; it's not the medium i think is best suited. but for what it was, the choices of what to cut, abridge, and include largely feel correct to me.
i got jumpscared once by clytemnestra and once by scylla and that was crazy
my personal favorite moment(s) of the film: stringing and plucking the bow to make it sing. the sound design on that alone was worth the imax ticket, but man, to find a way to call back to that... from the first scene i knew how they were gonna do the climax and it hurt my fucking feelings!!!!
the bad and the ugly:
whether by natural inclination or direction, matt damon plays odysseus as an everyman, and the thing about everymen is they can't have strong personalities. the range goes from "kind of despondent" to "even more despondent," in the words of one of my companions my (who, again, went in blind). he's bland as hell. the most fun i had with him was in the palace as a beggar and his face was covered. the lead is the film's most significant problem, and that's not something i can forgive.
like it's to the point that when he wants to hear the sirens, it feels out of character
the costume design is exactly as bad as it looked in the trailers. mostly i can ignore this because it's really not my bag, but in some cases (the trojan armor, notably) it inhibits the messaging
and, to a lesser extent, the monster character design. the laistrygonian giants truly should have been cut for time anyway. goofy ass
i will join the popular stance against a cyclops encounter with no "nobody," but for me it's not so much about that exchange, iconic as it is, as the loss of all humanizing traits of polyphemus. it doesn't sit right with me to treat him as a mindless monster encounter instead of a chance to probe odysseus' xenophobia.
i have long noted that no one is interested in portraying agamemnon as a human being, but never before to THIS extent, oh my god. he kept making me laugh which was not the intended effect
helen and clytemnestra not actually having much screentime was a letdown for me, since that was what i was looking forward to most.
since they bothered to cast mia goth you might think melantho would have anything to do, but you would be wrong.
slavery is generally glossed over. antinous makes one reference to slaves having no choice but to be loyal to who's in power; that's truly it. as usual (with the return 2024, for instance, which has much stronger theming) i thought the message would have hit harder if the hanged women were included
if i had a nickel for every time someone cut all the sex from my beloved sex object i would have 2 nickels
inconsistent diction. every time telemachus said "mom" or "dad" it broke my immersion
the interesting, [some of] what's missing, and whether it worked for me:
the ambiguity of the gods, particularly athena (and her various disguises in the poem): i would not characterize it as a "fakeout" as some people have. there are still undeniable supernatural elements in the film; whether you read athena as odysseus' hallucination, how he perceives her, or how she chooses to present to him is left up to you. worked for me, but would have worked even better if he had killed that trojan girl himself
replacing the phaeacians and the lotus-eaters with calypso: poor nausikaa, i miss her. but i thought pairing calypso and the lotus, odysseus piecing together the story while literally picking up the pieces of his broken wreckage, was a strong choice to streamline the narrative
along with that, the way his departure from calypso is framed as a surrender of control felt powerful in that moment, after all the useless striving against fate. people made fun of the "defy the gods" tagline but once again, if one cares to actually see the movie, the point being made is that odysseus can't.
circe: loved the setup, enjoyed swapping out a palace for a more folklorish witch's hut, absolutely ate up the body horror. but i think the thumbprint of madeline miller's circe is there in how she's portrayed as vulnerable rather than a woman in a position of power, as i would argue she is in the odyssey, and i think that's a weird choice to make when you're stripping the sexual violence that is in the narrative out (the hanged women).
i could take or leave crow pasiphae but it doesn't actively offend me
the underworld, sinon, and antinous: rolling together elpenor and achilles into sinon, and using him as a representative of common soldiers who died at troy, was not a move i predicted. it works to tie the story of the horse back into the narrative, while also giving antinous more depth and history. i also loved the visuals of tiresias, the muck, and the tide of dead soldiers almost dragging odysseus down with them. however: i think his mother's ghost could have been included here without losing anything.
i'm not sure why both odysseus' parents were cut, actually. it doesn't streamline all that much.
odysseus' return being interrupted with an action sequence where he rescues telemachus at pylos: mixed feelings. my first feeling was that it would undercut the impact of the violence odysseus does in the hall not much later, but i'm not sure that it did. mentor's death was an interesting note and callback to the body odysseus had to leave behind in the cyclops' cave. did enjoy it as father-son shenanigans, but missed opportunity for odysseus' first interaction with telemachus to be witnessing another man greeting him as a father, which is, you know, more thematic and impactful.
totally copied the return's homework by having odysseus recognized because he does pet argos before the dog dies. not sure how i feel about it as the moment of recognition between him and telemachus but i think i liked it? neither actor was really Giving but it was like. serviceable
i will say again that i loved anne hathaway as penelope. my only complaint is that they sanded down her ambiguity (i suspect to make her more sympathetic, which i object to on principle). having her, for instance, vocally state (in private) that she hates the suitors, or odysseus flat-out saying he doesn't have to test penelope's loyalty, he just has to prove his identity to her, is the coward's way out of the mind games. in the poem it's very much both. nolan's penelope is way more ready to believe it's odysseus. and yes maybe i did tear up when he plucked the bow and she realized, but is that and the athena brooch (the brooch being based on something in the odyssey) as clever, iconic, or indicative of her character as the tree bed? i submit to you that it is not
spinning odysseus' foretold quest and departure from ithaca as going into exile after violating xenia: less ambiguous than the poem's ending in many ways. but i am kind of a sucker for it, especially after my stomach plummeting when they played it like he was going to die. and idk. penelope goes with him. am i supposed to say i don't allow that. me. ME?
trying to tie in the bronze age collapse: maybe i'm just too used to reading the odyssey as mythical rather than historical, but this was not successful with me. i did like the emphasis on xenia, including that odysseus' ability to "come home" has been shattered by his own violations of hospitality laws. i just don't think that really worked as "the reason civilization is collapsing and what if the real sea peoples were the pirates we created along the way"
i also don't think you can entirely successfully bring home (haha) the theme of odysseus' displacement while also reveling in the violence, as a film. in a way i think nolan tries to lure the audience in with spectacle, then to deconstruct it by returning, at last, to the horror of the sack of troy. but we dive right into the violence again with the suitors, and i don't know that we're any less invested in odysseus' coolness. i think it will be interesting (for more people than just me) to compare this to the return, which wants more or less the same arc for odysseus, but executes it more consistently and with more economical storytelling. so did this work for me? i... i don't know. at some point i'm going to write a substack essay about it, probably.
there's enough in this film that i believe it will inspire people to read the poem, and if they have the tenacity to stick with it, i think they won't have a wrong idea of what it is and be put off. (i use the word tenacity because i think people make too much out of how hard it is to read the odyssey; i think it is and should be accessible, but it is still a story removed from us by time and culture and style, so it does ask you to put in some work.)
Absolutely hysterical how the guy named Hatred is the most level-headed and smartest dude in the Greek camp. Also how he ended up naming his first born son Sniper.
the whole chip on telemachus' shoulder in the odyssey isn't that he's a helpless little kid. it's that he is a man, he should be treated like a man, but he can't take up the role he's entitled to. and because of it he resents not only the suitors, but also both of his parents. in odysseus' case the outward resentment seems to resolve itself along with the doubt of his existence, when athena reveals him; in penelope's it never really does. by the time of their last scene together telemachus still finds her hard to understand and disrespects her. he isn't closer to her because his father was absent. the war and deferred homecoming separated the two of them as much as it did odysseus and his homeland
chewing on this essay by helene foley, 'reverse similes and sex roles in the odyssey':
To keep an open place for Odysseys [Penelope] has symbolically stopped change on Ithaca. All the young men of the kingdom woo Penelope; they are thus prevented from maturing into husbands and warriors, potential rivals to Telemachus or Odysseus. [...] Yet in her effort to preserve Ithaca for Odysseus she cannot stop change entirely; thus the maturing of Telemachus creates increasing tensions for Penelope at the opening of the poem.
i like this concept of ithaca as unnaturally frozen in time, and penelope's struggle to maintain that very precarious in-between status quo for years.
mostly i enjoy that perspective of the obvious friction between telemachus and penelope in the odyssey. that process of keeping things unchanged is too delicate to survive telemachus' eventual maturity, and i think penelope understands that once her son starts being perceived as an adult, 1) he'll be in danger, and 2) the status quo will be changed, and so many things will inevitable be set in motion. but like, telemachus can't help but grow older! and of course he chafes at being stuck in a childlike role in his twenties, and in an ambiguous hierarchical position in his own home. the whole situation is stressful and unsatisfying to them both.
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telemachus' first interactions with athena are everything to me. he has no idea he's speaking to a goddess so there's no posturing, no pretense. just: “greetings, stranger. sit, rest, have some wine. btw not to be indelicate but my life is a joke & these suitors fucking suck. welcome to ithaca”
the first (non-verbal) interaction between telemachus and odysseus in the poem is odysseus offering telemachus his seat and telemachus refusing it. in this way telemachus seals his own fate
