Kama & Hallie

A Smiling Critters AU with the Smiling Critters and Poppy Playtime characters as the characters of the HBO show, "The Sopranos".

This masterpost was made for the purpose of putting all the AU comics in chronological order.

Just watched the new Odyssey movie. I have complicated feelings about it, which was what I expected.

Short review:

As I expected, I quite enjoyed it. I mean, it's Christopher Nolan, the guy knows how to make a good movie. The actors all did very well, great effects, a lot of very well done scenes, and the action scenes had me on the edge of my seat. It's definitely a very fun enjoyable movie and a good watch.

That being said, however, I still have tons of problems with it, and everything I've been saying about Greek myth protrayals by Hollywood still stand. To keep it short and simple, the sets looked dull, the costumes were just not fun to look at, a lot of the casting (while I did say the actors were great) really did not fit imo, the locations really took me out of the immersion, and the movie in general just looks dull af.

Long review (SPOILERS):

So let me just start by listing the parts of the movie I liked.

The Cyclops, Polyphemus, was very cool. While I wouldn't say it's my favourite cyclops design, it is very interesting and creative, and the sound design for this thing too was incredible, it shook the whole theatre.

Circe. The whole section involving was super well done. That scene of Odysseus's men turning into pigs, with Circe even morphing their bodies by hand and we can see the "in-between" states of their transformation when they're still these human-pig hybrids, holy shit that was horrifying.

The action was pretty good, especially during the climax. Like oh man, not kidding, that whole scene of Odysseus and Telemachus fighting the suitors actually had me on the edge of my seat, the OST really helped elevate the scene's intensity. Overall, extremely well done. Was really rooting for Odysseus there.

The actors all did a good job, I'd say. They played their parts well, quite sold me on the emotions, and yeah, did a good job at keeping my interest. Don't think it's anything award-winning for me but it was good. My favourite is easily Robert Pattinson as Antinous. Man, he did a great job. I really hated Antinous in this movie for all the right reasons, such a hateable detestable coward who I really rooted to get killed in the end.

Now onto the things I didn't like, which is...pretty much everything else. The most TLDR way I can sum up everything I didn't like is that nothing in this movie felt Greek in the slightest.

First, is the casting. To quickly get it out of the way, the fact none of the cast members are Greek really annoys me. I can already hear people making a ton of arguments against this about why this complaint is dumb and stupid like "It's just myth/fiction/fantasy" or "there aren't any major Greek actors" or "many Hollywood movies didn't cast Greeks and u didn't complain", I don't care, I stand by what I say. It is getting tiring not seeing Greeks in their own stories in Hollywood movies. And I get that this talking point has been used as an excuse for haters of this movie to be bigoted and racist, but saying "Greeks should star in their own stories more" really should not be such a controversial statement. Also, seeing Will Yun Lee as one of Odysseus's men was one of the most immersion-breaking casting choices for me, I gotta be honest. Yeah, I know, movie with a cyclops, but c'mon.

But anyways, ethnicity aside, while I did say I think all the actors did a fine job, I did not like the casting of this movie. White, black, Asian, whatever, barely any of them felt fitting to me at all. Matt Damon did very well in the movie, but I just could never really fully buy him as Odysseus, he just never felt "Odysseus" enough for me. Sean Bean (while yeah, not Greek either) was a perfect Odysseus, I immediately bought him the moment he appeared, he just oozed everything needed for the character. I honestly feel Oscar Isaac would have been a much better choice for Odysseus, got the skin tone to match too, but that's just me. Menelaus looked so boring to me, also for some reason they made him abusive to Helen for...idk why, actually. Agamemnon, while we never properly saw his face, also just did not look fitting. Tom Holland's honestly one of the few actors in the movie I felt looked fitting for the part, as he resembles a lot of Telemachus depictions I've seen.

Second is the costumes, the sets, the locations, and the general look of this movie. As I said in the beginning, there is nothing Greek about any of them. The costumes, even ignoring cultural and historical accuracy, these costumes just look terrible to me. Everyone has dug on Agamemnon's Batman armour so I won't comment too much on that, but the armour on Odysseus's men are so bland and boring to look at, like add some colours, please! The worst has to be the Trojans' armour, like holy damn it does not look good, it looks like it's made of marble and just looks ridiculous. And why do the Laestrygonians wear medieval-looking armour? It's just so weird.

The sets and the locations also did not feel Greek or Mediterranean in the slightest, because they literally aren't. The Greek ships are literally Viking longships, and while the movie was filmed in Greece and Italy in some places, it was also filmed in Iceland and Scotland which are about as far away from the Mediterranean as you can get, and those parts really broke my immersion. And adding to the dull non-Mediterranean look of the movie, the islands of Circe and Calypso just look so plain and boring. They're supposed to be very beautiful and lush, especially Calypso's island which was a paradise on Earth. But in the movie, there was nothing interesting about them at all, and Circe's island just looked like a typical dreary Medieval cottage, which is a huge shame as all those big cats sitting at the path to her house would have looked a lot cooler and fitting if the island was more sunny and colourful.

Lastly, the historical aspect of the movie. When I first saw the trailers for this movie, I initially assumed that it was gonna be a completely ahistorical fantasy movie completely separate any real-world influences and just its own thing, basically a more extreme Gladiator. So imagine my confusion when I saw the movie making references to the Sea People and the Bronze Age Collapse. Not to mention that "Our age of bronze is collapsing" line, like what in the Suicide Squad/Fant4stic was that? Like, wait, is this movie trying to be historical or not? How is it gonna make reference to these real world histories but then have the most ahistorical-looking aesthetic?

That's one of the biggest problems of the movie for me. It feels like it's trying to be two things at once. Like it can't decide whether it wants to be realistic or fantastical, which ends up creating this uncanny valley feel to it. It really confuses me why the gods besides Athena are not present at all in the story depite the huge role they play, yet it still includes all the other fantastical elements of the story.

I feel like I would have had way less problems with this movie if it just completely ditched all the attempts to be Bronze Age Greece and just went all the way out there, like making it space or smth. Then maybe stuff like the armours and the casting and whatever would have been less jarring and nobody would have questioned it so much.

Also, some more minor stuff I wanna point out. Excluding the "Nobody" line from the Cyclops sequence was pretty disappointing, but I guess Nolan figured that woulda been too comedic for the tone he was setting. And the ending too, with Odysseus and Penelope sailing out West, like what was that all about? I don't fully understand.

Simply put, this is a very narrow-minded, gross oversimplification, and frankly very insensitive and offensive way to view and describe mythology. As someone who has always loved myth and culture, and who deeply respects my own country's mythology and how inherent it is to our culture, this is an extremely terrible argument against criticism of Greek myth depictions, and frankly a very western ethnocentric view of mythology as a whole. I especially hate it when they compare mythology to superhero comics as a way to explain why getting upset and complaining about this is dumb, because despite their possible similarities, superhero comics and mythology are simply not the same.

While yes, mythology isn't real and features very fantastical and outlandish elements, dumbing down the idea of mythology as simply "fake and fictional" shows a complete dismissal and lack of understanding of what mythology is. Because mythology isn't just "fantasy and fiction", it is an integral part of an ethnic group's history and cultural heritage and identity. It is an integral anthropological part in making a culture and the people of that culture what it is and who they are. So by treating mythology as just something dumb and simple and not worth thinking about is not just dismissive of the significance of the stories of that myth, but the people who that mythology belongs to.

It especially annoys me because I have a strong feeling that the very same people who say this would not say the same if it was dealing with other, espcially non-white cultures like say Polynesian or Indian or Southeast Asian or African. They would be up in arms about portraying the mythology and culture of these people as accurately and authentic as possible. But I guess because Greece is just viewed as another white European country, they think it isn't as deserving of respect and care as much as other cultures. Despite the fact that Greece, being an Eastern Mediterranean civilization, has more in common with the Near East and Middle East than it does Western Europe.

It sucks to because I feel a lot of people often forget that Greek people are still around today, or if they do know they just don't pay much attention to them because they are no longer like the idealized Ancient Greece we picture in our minds. We don't think about modern Greece because a lot of people prefer to view Greece as this ancient distant forefather of "Western heritage/culture" or worse "white culture", and thus many Greeks are silenced for speaking out because many people of Western Europe or Western European descent have this mindset that Ancient Greece is part of their own heritage and culture, and because they view Ancient Greece as this romanticized ideal foundation for Western civilization, they somehow are under the impression they know more about Greek culture than actual Greeks do, because Greeks are always being told that they are completely seperate and thus unrelated and unknowledgable of their own heritage.

It's also why I dislike when people refute criticism of The Odyssey's casting by saying things like "Well, 300 didn't have a Greek cast and you liked it just fine". Yeah, exactly. I do enjoy many Hollywood movies about Ancient Rome and Greece despite them having barely if any Italian or Greek actors, but we already have tons of those movies where they're played by British actors, so why not try having an authentic cast for once?