Robin

Ok let's start with the positives since I don't want to be entirely critical and some parts were actually good

- I really liked the depictions of the Trojan War, especially since this movie was intended to be watched by people who had no context on the Odyssey and stories surrounding it

- Also both the way they depicted the horror of the war rather than just the glory of it was a very nice touch

- Talking about the experience being inside the horse was very interesting to see

- The depiction of Mycenean palace culture was actually pretty good, the architecture of Ithaca and Troy was not bad at all, and I liked the involvement of xenia (which they called Zeus' law) although it would have been nice to see the full procedures since in ancient culture there was a very specific set of rituals that went with it and a lot of the original epic's focus is on how to correctly perform xenia

- not so much a positive but I actually didn't really care about the use of language like 'dad', I don't think it takes away from the story to not use super formal language

- Cinematically it was a very good movie, the visuals were nice and I particularly liked the fight scenes (minus the use of bows but I'll talk about that later). I actually brought a friend who is a film studies student and has never read the Odyssey to watch it with me and he said it was great

Now onto the issues I had

- It was so incredibly loud, at some points I considered putting my headphones on because it was just unbearably loud

- Back to the bow, firstly the way that they had Odysseus fight with the bow was a bit strange, he was fighting in incredibly close quarters by shooting them with the bow, which in real life just wouldn't really work, like at that point it would make more sense to use the arrow to stab them

- Also they had him using a bow in the Trojan war which is very unfaithful to his character in a Homeric context, as this was considered cowardly. In Homeric culture, warriors such as Odysseus fought with a sword and spear, since using a bow meant that you could ambush someone rather than having an honourable duel, so Odysseus using a bow here goes completely against his character

- What on earth happened with Pylos, none of the people I went with had any clue what was happening in that whole scene

- I feel like having the Laestrygonians fight with armour and swords takes away from some of the magic of the adventure books since they were supposed to represent how far Odysseus was from home since no civilisations were recognisable

- This movie claimed to be based on Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey. While I studied the Odyssey translated by E. V. Rieu, I know that Wilson's translation (the first one into English done by a woman) gave a voice and extra dimension to the female characters which hadn't been seen before, which is why I am particularly disappointed by the handling of female characters. Circe seemed to surrender to Odysseus under absolutely no pressure, Penelope's intelligence was not present at all, there was no commentary at all on the horrific deaths of the female slaves in Ithaca, and Calypso's speech on the double standards between male and female gods was completely left out

- The gods were basically no present?? Athena was there but she basically had no role other than randomly appearing sometimes. Especially not having Poseidon throws off the plot a lot after Polyphemus, and Hermes also makes quite a few appearances in the original

- This one isn't as important but I was quite sad about how my favourite book, book 11 (the underworld) was handled. Odysseus' mum was not there so we didn't get that emotional scene (now that I think about it Anticleia and Laertes weren't even mentioned) and Achilles was missing so we didn't get his testimony of how he would rather live in poverty than die a glorious death, which was incredibly relevant to Odysseus' story

- Another thing was that the overall movie came off as too serious and dramatic, when the original epic did have a lot of comedy. The 2 main examples that I can think of are Odysseus pathetically crying on Calypso's beach after all the build up of what a great hero he was, and Elpenor (a member of Odysseus' crew) drinking too much, falling off of Circe's roof and dying

- In the first half of the movie they actually had a lot of scenes involving Argos, Odysseus' dog. This made me excited because I thought that we would get a big emotional scene of his death, but it felt like it was only a second and then we were back to Telemachus realising that the man was Odysseus

- Then just a few quickfires, it was missing the Phaeacians, the lotus eaters (who seemed to be blended with Calypso?), Aeolus and the bag of winds, Nestor, Menelaus' story with Proteus, both of Helen's stories (which add so much nuance to her character), and the ending/resolution of the suitors conflict felt incredibly rushed despite the movie being nearly 3 hours long

- I knew that we weren't going to get historically accurate armour and that's fine, but it does hurt to know that Nolan was in contact with Dimitrios Katsikis, a blacksmith who specialises in historically accurate Greek amour, and then just ignored him

- The section with Polyphemus was absolutely butchered, he has basically no speech, and it removed the Nobody trick, which is possibly all that some people knew about Odysseus going into this movie

Overall, going into this movie I knew it was going to be inaccurate both culturally and with the plot, but that doesn't stop me from being unhappy with the changed they chose to make

If you would like a more in depth take on this, proceed below.