It Could And Should Be Dumber

Also me, scrolling the tag for (1) minute:

This all rocks.

I think this is the beauty of the classics because you can have a bunch of different interpretations. Keeping to dogma a millennium old isn’t always necessary. There have been plenty of more accurate adaptations of the epic put to film.

Film adaptations are naturally transformative pieces of art, especially when translating a 16 hour read into 3 hours of visual storytelling. Lord of the Rings cut out tons, even with the extended editions. Thankfully the feelings of PTSD for the hobbits were textual, and that sentiment that war changes people held up 40 years later.

But nearly three centuries? I think what people miss in Nolan’s adaptation is that the Trojans worship the same gods as the Mycenaeans. What truly broke Odysseus was seeing Athena’s temple sacked, the same goddess he’d been carrying with him since he left home. Odysseus still had a sober enough viewpoint that he could see how 10 years of rage cause those of his army to desecrate and destroy things that even they held sacred.

To Nolan, it wasn’t the act of hubris with Polyphemus that damned Odysseus’ voyage, all of Agamemnon’s army were damned the moment they broke through the gates, some like Agamemnon were damned before they even set sail.

I love that interpretation. And he’s consistent with it. His goal wasn’t to make an accurate to text adaptation and I knew that the moment his name was on the project. Honestly I’m impressed he kept the monsters and magic. I was fully expecting an O Brother Where Art Thou, more set in realism, interpretation of the odyssey. But Nolan actually made some truly horrifying imagery.

and sure they're both retelling's of the Odyssey that make flagrant changes but they really aren't comparable.

The Greeks used the excuse of a woman and the war of gods to wage war with an economic competitor, then showed up on their enemy's shores and broke their own laws of hospitality to win the war and ransacked the city and its people. The story of those actions traveled the world, making everyone afraid of the "people from the sea," even the Greeks who WERE the people from the sea.

The suitors cried about the laws not being upheld for them but were unwilling to uphold them themselves. The same society was terrified of this invisible enemy that would invade because of their lack of morals, unaware that THEY are the ones who broke the laws first. They are their own boogeyman. The fear of foreignors was never about the actions of foreignors but their own actions.

The gods haunt the narrative as an ideal. If they were confirmed real, then this movie becomes a warning against breaking away from "the correct religion." Instead, it is a warning of how mutual care and respect for your fellow man, whether gods exist or not, is the backbone of society, and without it, morality becomes something to twist and fear monger.

The gods couldn't exist in this adaptation, so a lot of the plot points involving the gods had to be changed or left out. "Nobody" only matters if Odysseus doxxes himself for poseidon to punish. (The crew members insisting that they definitely heard the cyclops say posiedon and jumping to the conclusion that he was poseidon's son and they were cursed was a great change in my opinion.) The wind bag can only exist if the gods exist. Athena can only guide Telemechus and Odysseus if the gods exist. ("Athena" potentially only being Odysseus's guilt for the preistess he let die who only shows up in times where his actions in Troy are thematically important was *chef's kiss*.) The Trojan War is only a war sanctioned by the gods if the gods exist. Odysseus being stuck with Calypso for so long needs another reason (the lotus) if it's not by the will of the gods. What would Circe and Calypso be like if they weren't eternal goddesses? Did the crew go to Hades, or did they just perform a spell that raised the dead?

Magic and Monsters can still exist without the gods, and everything else can be explained by superstition, nature, and bad luck. The ideal of the gods haunt the narrative so wonderfully.

I'm not a fan of Nolan's directorial aesthetic, but for the themes he wanted to explore, I think this was a fantastic retelling of the original. Accuracy isn't and shouldn't always be the goal. Sometimes, taking an existing story and making something new in order to speak to a different aspect of humanity is all we can really hope for.

It's meant to be tragic. That even after all that she realized she wanted to change as her last words and thoughts. She didn't want to go.

LOOK AT HIS FACE