Pens & Swords

a note on translations and adaptations

so, as of time of writing, i've seen the film twice: once i was lucky enough to see it on one of those fancy-schmancy 70mm IMAX screens, and once in non-IMAX 4DX. i would highly recommend both experiences to anyone fortunate enough to be able to access them.

important note: do not bring snacks to a 4DX screening of the odyssey, or if you do, please have the courtesy to finish them quickly and not loudly crunch them in the seat next to me during every quiet scene, and then during the scenes where the seats move around, complain they might fall off your lap

lightning round: cool stuff

the sound—ludwig göransson's score and sound design were amazing. i read somewhere that nolan forbade using a traditional orchestra, and instead the sound team used representations of ancient instruments, and it works so well, i love all the music, and of course the musical sting whenever odysseus plucks his bow gives me chills every time

anne hathaway—penelope is a complex character in the myth that can nonetheless easily be flattened into a far less interesting one; a woman pining away for her husband. i'm really glad hathaway was given the opportunity to show all sides of penelope, including her anger and her cunning. you could even argue there are hints of the interpretation where she is using the suitors to protect herself from telemachus as much as she's using telemachus to protect herself from the suitors. and, of course, hathaway's performance is stunning. every time she was on screen was just, amazing.

troy—i'll get into the Themes™ further down but for now, all the sequences in troy were just incredible to watch. the set design, the scale, the music, all of it is just so... yeah. likewise, the scenes inside the horse are insanely cool and stressful. i love the detail that, when that dude is stabbed from above, odysseus pulls out a rag to wipe the sword clean—and then we see that soldier check his sword for blood!

circe—a really, really interesting take on circe and one i personally find a lot more compelling than the more 'accurate' depictions of her as a temptress and seductress. like, yeah, she's a woman alone, visited by soldiers and other hot-blooded men who have been abusing zeus' law to force themselves into her home and take as they please. her insistence that she has not transformed the men into pigs but revealed them is also a really cool take, i love it. shout out to the absolutely horrifying practical effects and CGI, as well as the truly disgusting shots of the men eating

agamemnon—of course, as a person, agamemnon SUCKS, but this is a really cool interpretation of him. unlike the iliad, the oresteia, iphigenia in aulis, he doesn't have as important a role, so he can just be this menacing presence. i unironically loved his insane helmet and his silent looming, and while the first time around i was a little bummed to hear him speak in hades, the second time i realised that's actually great, too: all that power, all that presence, and yet he, too, was killed. he too, wanders the lands of the dead. he was, ultimately, just a man.

also he's dripped out. how can you not love it?

helen—there is definitely a strong tilt towards helen having consensually run away in modern tellings of the trojan cycle (see also: troy, 2004), and while i personally think there's a lot more ambiguity in the original myth (including accounts where helen is enchanted by aphrodite, or helen is actually spirited away to egypt by hera and the war is fought over a double, or happily remarried to menelaus post-troy), this version is really rich, and lupita nyong'o does so much with so little time. her and john berthal's physical acting is chilling. the detail of helen being the semi-divine and 'most beautiful' and yet having an IDENTICAL TWIN is making me climb the walls i love it so much

the laestrygonians—i absolutely ADORE what nolan did with these guys. i wasn't too fussed about "giants eat men and rock their ships to pieces" in the original text but the way they're done here (especially in how it ties to the themes nolan is playing with) is SO clever. the forced perspective stuff alone is insane, not to mention the magical realism of the trees moving around, and the fact that odysseus' men are lured in by a young man, basically a child, who brings a horde of men to destroy them?? incredible. i also think it's super telling that this is when athena first appears to odysseus; when he starts to realise just how badly he fucked up by violating zeus' law.

the bard—drawing the connection between spoken poetry (which is what the odyssey and iliad would have originally been performed as) and rapping by casting travis scott as the bard is just so, so good. the music/singing itself is also so evocative. a face, a fleet, a war, a man, a thought, a trick. so simple and so rich, not to mention the simple music itself with the thumping of the stick, calling people to listen. you can hear it echo through other moments, too, like when the horse is hauled into troy at the beginning. not to mention the music during the credits. i can't even really verbalise exactly why and how much i like scott's character and music. it's one of those "scratching every part of my brain" things, y'know?

frankly just the entire opening is incredible. any time we're in ithaca's palace with the fire lighting and the tense close-up shots and thinly-veiled insults is just delightful

the bow—so something that's not super obvious is that part of why penelope's challenge was so difficult isn't just that odysseus' hunting bow has insane draw-strength (though it very much does), but that it's a recurve bow, which wasn't super common. appropriately enough for odysseus, there was a certain 'trick' to know how to string it easily, which included being sat down so you could better brace the bow in the direction you wanted it to bend; it was a weapon that required you to be clever and cunning and know the right way to manipulate it.

should've looked that gift horse in the mouth 🐎

i have no sense of what the average person's knowledge of greek myth is these days (and quartz, of course) so i feel it's important to note that, in the original poem, the trojan horse is not actually a peace offering.

instead, the greeks, during their sack of troy, defile a temple of athena and steal the palladium. this angers athena and she curses their voyages home. to appease her, the greeks build the horse as a sort of replacement, and sinon tells the trojans that if they bring the horse into troy to replace the palladium, the horse might bring troy the same favour from athena that the palladium originally did.

now, the cool thing is, is that by making the horse and using it to sneak into troy, it is still a token to athena, as her domains include strategy and wisdom, especially in battle. the token of the greeks is therefore not (or not only) "look at this cool horse statue" but "look at how it is a physical manifestation of clever strategy"

however, nolan's choice to turn a clever piece of battle strategy into a violation of the most fundamental social contract of their society, is quite possibly my favourite change he makes, because it's a seriously rich idea.

while i do think that nolan's odysseus is a very different odysseus to the poems (more on that later), the ripple effect of using the horse to get into troy, of breaking zeus' law forever, of shattering the fragile social bonds between men and the bonds between gods and men by extension, is a really clever thread to pull on with the hindsight that the iliad and the odyssey and that whole epic cycle are set right before the late bronze age collapse and the subsequent greek dark ages—after which we got ancient greece as you and i know it, which is when the poems were actually written down for the first time

and this is hardly the first time nolan's made a story about a man whose incredible idea wrought immense destruction and irrevocably changed the world for the worse (i'm sure you've seen oppenheimer (2024), and even if you haven't, you can draw the parallels yourself. you're a smart cookie, i believe in you.) but i have to say that this is the most evocative it's felt to me, probably because he's had the most license to make it fantastical and otherworldly

i particularly enjoyed how it tied into the sea peoples, because they're a strange facet of the late bronze age. some people have put forward that they were a semi-mythic race of otherwise unknown seafarers, vicious foreigners, etc, etc. the hypothesis that they were first the cause of the late bronze age collapse later morphed into the idea they were a symptom of it—which, i mean, ties in so neatly to the idea that the sacking of troy broke some fundamental law of nature.

on a personal note, i love those kinds of sacred-bonds-being-broken stories. that's part of why i loved game of thrones' red wedding so much: a rule and practice so ingrained in our entire society that the idea of breaking it isn't impossible, it's just ludicrous. i liken it to road markings, in a sense. they have no physical power over us, but we are nonetheless bound by their rules by nothing except our own sense of decency, and our respect for others.

i also really want to get my hands on a copy of euripides the trojan women because i've heard nolan's interpretation of athena's disapproval of the trojan horse trick and the acheans sacking one of her temples draws a lot from that version

it also ties in very neatly with another central theme of both the film and the original poem, nóstos (νόστος) or 'returning', where the life and world odysseus wants to return to is gone, both because of passed time, but also the fallout of his sins. penelope embodies that especially well, not only because she both yearns for odysseus' return and is the thing to which he wants to return, but because she reminds telemachus that even if odysseus does come back, things will not be as they were when he left

the closing shots of the horse over odysseus' monologue can read in so many different ways. there's hope things will rise again after the dark age, yes, but that doesn't erase the damage the world has already incurred and will yet incur in the future. the fact that he is the OG sea peoples, sailing to the west in the hopes of outrunning this plague of destruction and violence, seemingly unaware of (or perhaps grimly resigned to) the fact that wherever he chooses to land, he will in some way spread it yet further. people will lose the ability to write, and they will make beautiful songs that make people weep, but the mistakes, the sins, will never be forgotten.

sing muse, of a trick, a trick to break the walls of troy. and with them, burn the world entire.

xenia and the social contract

so, zeus' law is obviously xenia (ξενῐ́ᾱ), which more-or-less translates to 'guest friendship', and refers to the strict custom of hospitality. next to wrath, it's probably one of the most central themes of the entire trojan war epic cycle.

a violation of xenia is actually the thing to kick off the whole war, when paris abducts helen from sparta—whether consensual or not, helen is menelaus' wife and therefore his 'property'. paris had therefore 'stolen' her while he was a guest in menelaus' house, robbing his host.

now, i did take a slight issue with the re-framing of xenia in the film—it's not a big thing—but i do think it unintentionally weakens the point trying to be made, and applies a notably christian framing to the concept.

which is to say, xenia in ancient greece was the social requirement/expectation to treat guests kindly in one's own home. hosting was a sacred duty, even a political one, and hosting honoured zeus patron of foreigners and god of hospitality. violating hospitality law was like, the second-biggest taboo you could possibly engage in

in the film, telemachus states that zeus' law is to "treat others as you would be treated, because they might be a god in disguise". this, to me, injects just a little too much of that 'only doing good out of fear of retribution from some divine higher power' that's present in a lot of evangelical circles, where a lot of morality is externalised, and i would argue it weakens the film's overall message of the social contract having been broken. it makes xenia sound like something reluctant, done out of fear rather than a mutual respect for one's fellow man.

and, sure, you could argue this is years after troy, and so zeus' law is already broken, but i still think it weakens the point that this is a custom the suitors are abusing—because, at least for now, it holds. it also muddies the water when telemachus points out that antinous is clearly not a god, yet continues to enjoy penelope's/telemachus' hospitality.

it's a small thing, and ultimately it still ties in well to the themes of broken contracts, but yeah, it was just christian enough for me to go "wait, what?"

anyway, anyway, xenia or zeus' law or however you frame it, is built on 'common decency'—the same decency behind the customs of honouring the dead, which we see crumble alongside it. compare the battlefield full of fallen soldiers' armour when odysseus leaves the beaches of troy to the multiple instances of odysseus' men pushing back against his refusal to honour them. you can definitely read it as pragmatic, but it's cold and cruel—this is what the world has become, post-troy. we have no reason to assume achilles didn't kill hector and desecrate his body, in this version as in every other, but even wrathful achilles eventually came to his senses and allowed the body of his most hated enemy to be collected by his grieving father and given proper rites.

tying into the breaking of social contracts is the scene with circe, which is not explicit (or even really implicit, because they don't call attention to it) but nonetheless has an interesting addition to the breaking of social contracts and the gods' laws.

so, social taboo number two is violating hospitality. social contract number one is cannibalism.

and while your mileage may vary, i do think it's very interesting how, with the exception of odysseus (and that one guy who stays with the ship i guess, don't worry about him) all the remaining crew eat circe's food, specifically the meat, and therefore consumed the meat of humans.

only after this point does circe, and later tiresias, say that odysseus will be the only one of his men to return home. odysseus broke the world, but he has recognised his guilt by this point: both during the burning of troy, and more explicitly when athena appears to him for the first time, between the laestrygonians and circe. his men are shown to still pillage quite happily, unburdened by any sense that they have done something wrong, and laying any blame at odysseus' feet, as their king. circe is right when she points out these men did not simply pillage and rape and murder because odysseus ordered them to. the blame lies on their leader, but not only their leader.

"why did they flee instead of welcoming us" eurylochus asks, as the village burns in the background. these men lived in a world of palaces and wonders and language, and they broke it. like the sirens' song, it is what they most want, and what they most cannot have.

gods + hubris

i am a BIG fan of the ambiguity of the gods' presence. the inter-title, a time of apparent magic, works so well for me. athena's lines of 'who doesn't understand pain, a good harvest, a child's smile' really solidify the idea that these entities, if they are real, are so powerful and incomprehensible that they almost can't be noticed anyway, they are simply too large.

and the ambiguity ties well into odysseus' guilt throughout the film. he seems to have been a literal man, who based himself on honour (the plucking of his bowstring, e.g.) rather than a fear of retribution from the gods. and this, ultimately, is what leads him, in his desperate moment, to think he can go above the gods and violate zeus' law, with disastrous consequences.

there's a lot going on with that theme, from odysseus believing the gods are disinterested ("the gods help those who help themselves"), to his willingness to violate xenia which sends the whole thing crumbling down. there is a reading of this film with no gods at all, where athena does not appear to him, but instead the visage of the priestess he executed exists wholly in his own mind as a manifestation of his guilt. either works, because aren't the sea and the sky kind of gods anyway? uncaring and immensely powerful?

and, if the gods were there before, in the semi-divine age of heroes, it is clear that they are receding now. their laws have been violated, their children blinded, their cattle slaughtered, and so many of their favoured warriors littering the lands of the dead, unhonoured.

guilt, control, and more hubris

obviously tying into the broken social contracts and the worsening of the world is odysseus' guilt and his desire for control. the climax of the movie begins with odysseus finally surrendering himself to the gods and admitting there are things he cannot control.

i don't necessarily view this as a triumphant moment, because while he does make it home, the fact remains the world he knew is gone and he very much had a hand in the breaking of it

it is very interesting to watch the progression of odysseus' relationship with guilt and blame across the film, because you can view it as a kind of hubris. he was the one to come up with the plan for the horse, he was the one who permitted the sack of troy, and he was the one who broke zeus' law forever. athena says at one point that he thinks himself above the gods in this regard, not because he seeks to defy them, but because he believes he alone bears the blame. circe puts the same point on him: odysseus sent up his men to her, and all they have done in odysseus' name is his fault as well as theirs.

and it's... an interesting reading, but it's one of those ones that rubs up against modern sensibilities. i do think odysseus is to blame, actually, and i don't think he gets to entirely offload that guilt onto the gods, just as i don't think his men get to entirely offload their guilt (or, culpability, anyway) onto him. and, in fairness, i don't think he actually does, but it seems like the film itself a little too eager to forgive him. it spends two thirds of its runtime setting up why odysseus feels guilty, and then the last hour is heartfelt reunions and cool fight scenes.

and i'm certainly not bored—the scene of odysseus surrendering himself to the ocean is a cool visual for a kind of spiritual cleansing, and he does, in fact, continue to reap the results of his own actions by being forced to kill the suitors and accept exile because, while he abused xenia in troy, they abused xenia in his own home—but it kind of ties in to my main (and really only) complaint about the film, and that's how a lot of the characters' worst aspects are sanded off.

greek 'heroes'

it's hardly groundbreaking to point out that ancient greece was misogynistic and racist. in that respect, i am glad we didn't see odysseus and his men rape women en masse, take slaves, and so forth.

i also understand that a modern audience is not really going to want to root for a man who rapes women, cheats on his wife, takes slaves and murders civilians. aside from the trojan horse, the worst thing odysseus really does in the film is blind polyphemus, which we are shown is an explicitly petty action, as it's the one time outside of active battle that he doesn't pluck his bow before firing it

(his own sense of honour has been cast aside, another social contract broken, and only afterwards, revealed to have been terrifyingly fragile all alone. he tries to pick up the pieces by plucking his bow for the deer/man with the great ass, and later with the suitors, but the damage is done. troy cannot be un-burned any more than polyphemus can be un-blinded, odysseus' men un-eaten)

but i do think the film takes it a little too far. in the same way oppenheimer (2023) had those black-and-white sections to essentially provide a route for oppenheimer, man who broke the world, to be the underdog; odysseus, man who broke the world, is far less of a manipulative trickster and pillager. he is weighed down by his immense guilt the entire time, and he is painted as a far more traditionally heroic character for it.

and i'm not annoyed by his guilt, i'm glad he feels bad, but again, the film seems a bit reluctant to actually delve into the actions of the central character who has indirectly caused all this terrible stuff.

menelaus, by contrast, is all-but-outright-stated to be helen's abuser (i've seen some people suggest helen might have scarred herself out of frustration/desperation, as her beauty has caused her so much suffering, and while i don't dislike that idea, the way menelaus moves and speaks makes it pretty clear he's 'showing off his work'), even as he's lauded as another hero of troy. and, sure, he's not the protagonist, but the willingness of the film to make one guy an utter piece of shit feels a lot louder when everyone else is softened.

calypso is kind of just... there. i'll be quite honest, she's the most blatant example of Nolan Writing Women across the entire film. i don't really believe she loves odysseus, nor do i think she covets him or is desperate to not be alone. if she did assault him sexually, it's left in deep, deep subtext, because we never even see them kiss. and i'm not annoyed we don't have a scene of a man being assaulted, but it does result in calypso being incredibly flat.

calypso possessing the lotuses that drug odysseus also removes some of his blame—which feels all the stranger when lined up with his lingering guilt. calypso has this line about the lotuses not changing who you are, and odysseus' subconscious desire to forget/hide, and i do think that's a cool idea, but it does seem like yet another way to remove blame from his character, and calypso's.

she doesn't explicitly imprison him against his will, nor does she assault him—in fact, odysseus doesn't engage in any kind of infidelity, even though the poems state he has a son with circe. again, modern sensibilities, but i would've been totally fine with a more malicious, sinister calypso, especially as her refusal to let him leave would've tied really well into the perversion of xenia that's rippling across the world.

penelope, also, gets her most controversial moment fudged: antinous points out that slaves cannot help but be loyal to the future, but the only one of penelope's slaves/servants shown to be explicitly disloyal is mia goth, who is totally consenting to it, and she's also the only one shown to be shut in with odysseus and the suitors. i kind of think it's a shame, really, because there could've been a really interesting little complex dynamic of mia goth being trapped between a rock and a hard place as a woman who cannot refuse a man and a slave who cannot refuse her mistress. but, at the same time, it's already a three-hour-long movie.

jesus christ this is so long

so, in summation, this is an excellent film, even if it does bear a few unmistakable hallmarks of its creator's biases—as all art inevitably does. for the most part, i'm loving what nolan is doing, and in the same way you'll see a line that's like "well that was patently obvious, why did you state that aloud", a protagonist can only be so morally grey before audiences start hating them, even though i do think a more explicitly villainous calypso would've been really cool.

translation and bias

i cannot sufficiently convey how fascinating adaptations are, from a psychological perspective, from a sociological perspective, from a storytelling perspective. laid over the primary artist's work, and the implications of that work (intentional and otherwise) is the filter of a second individual, who will pull on certain themes more than others, whose own biases will interpret certain things differently than others. it's like a game of telephone.

homer (or whoever wrote down the iliad and the odyssey) had his own biases when the iliad and the odyssey were codified and written into the versions we have today. and then every time a translator has come along, because there is not a one-to-one, this-is-the-only-right-word match between homeric greek and english (or whichever language it's being translated into) there is necessarily another layer being imposed onto the original text.

for example, the two translations of the iliad and the odyssey i'm currently reading are the penguin clothbound classics versions (originally translated in the 1940s by e.v. rieu, revised in the 90s by his son, d.c.h. rieu) and professor emily wilson's translations.

as rich as the penguin versions are, it is nonetheless painfully obvious that they were translated by a man in the 1940s. the ancient greeks were famously not super great about women, but you can still see where the sensibilities and biases of rieu act on top of those pre-existing biases.

a good example would be odyssey 21.6, when rieu describes penelope's hand as "strong" as she grips the key to unlock the bow that odysseus will use to prove his identity. other translations have used "steady" or "clenched". wilson uses "muscular, firm". here we see the complexity of translation: the greek word παχείηι has also been translated as "thick" or "stout". some scholars have argued this highlights penelope's constancy and fidelity to odysseus, others that twenty years of waiting and ruling in his stead have exhausted her, and others still that, simply, she is a weaver, which required very muscular hands. rieu's "strong" is therefore certainly not inaccurate, but it lays bare some of his own expectations about what kind of hands a heroine or queen 'should' have.

there is also a floweriness to the language that, while certainly lush, is also tinted with an incredibly 1940s way of speaking, very literal and descriptive as characters describe what they shall do, in detail, and then proceed to do it. some of this is because the iliad and the odyssey, having originally been poems, repeated phrases a lot. large chunks of the iliad, in particular, uses the same descriptors or the same phrases to describe how someone fights, or is killed. this repetition both aided the poets whose job was to memorise and recite the piece, as well as the rhythm of the words themselves.

in addition to this, though, d.c.h. rieu notes in his preface to the odyssey that his father, in his initial translations, elaborated the homeric poetry, and so we run up against the question of whether e.v. rieu went with flowery language because he liked it or because he felt it was in the spirit of homer's original intent.

contrast with wilson, whose translations seem pared-back and almost stark by comparison. in the same way you can justify the penguin floweriness with the large chunks of repetition, you can justify this interpretation with how there is very little internality in the poems. characters do not recount their thoughts or their emotions much, and even when they speak, it's more about what they are going to do.

but, equally, in the same way you can also argue rieu's floweriness was a personal preference, with wilson, you can argue she is deliberately trying to strip back all but the most literal, on-the-page occurrences, to limit her own 'layer' of bias, and thereby allow the reader the maximum freedom for their own interpretation—essentially trying to get as close as possible to what it might have been like to read it in the original greek. you could even say it is an attempt to pull away the self-aggrandisement of "war" and "conquest" and "glory" highlight that, fundamentally, these characters are slavers, war criminals, and rapists. this is, in a way, a central theme of the iliad.

in either case, wilson nonetheless imposes her own worldview on the iliad and the odyssey as much as rieu(s) did, and every other translator—that's why so many people recommend reading several different ones. i know of one translation of the iliad that attempted to preserve the format of the poetry itself above all else, so it was written in rhyming couplets.

is that any "more" or "less" valid than wilson's stark recitation? than rieu's flowery repetition? that depends entirely on your opinion, and what you can back up with critical analysis

okay, so that's translations. what about adaptations?

adaptations are similarly interesting for the presence of biases, but this is slightly different in that an adaptation is not necessarily expected to be a one-to-one representation of the original work

and, subsequently "a good adaptation" is not a concrete definition. i would say it's easier to point to a translation as "good" or "bad" than an adaptation because a translation is supposed to convey an agreed meaning. whether or not you describe penelope's hand as "strong" or "muscular" or "steady" she is nonetheless holding that key and she is not holding it timidly. she is certain in her course of action.

so, to my mind, an adaptation can be rated on three metrics (well, four if you include is it good/entertaining? but i would argue this goes for any story, regardless of whether it's original or not) and these are:

fidelity of story—literally, if you write out all the events of the original text in a list, and check them off as you go through the adaptation, are the objects in the list, and the order in which they appear, the same?

fidelity of theme—what are the themes of the original text, and are they present in the adaptation, independent of actual story events?

adaptational intent—what is the author of the adaptation trying to say/do with this spin on the story? is this a passionless recounting of events we're all already familiar with, or is there a greater 'point' or 'meaning'?

a good example of fidelity of story would be holes (2003), a famously accurate adaptation of the novel. fidelity of theme can be seen in cthulu (2007), in which the horror of feeling out of place and in danger in a town of people who are both strangers and yet your family is changed from innsmouth's fish people to being queer.

adaptational intent is exemplified in pretty much every guillermo del toro film, though i have a special fondness for frankenstein (2025), and pinnochio (2022) is also an excellent deconstruction of the fascism present in the original's "you must obey in order to be considered a person" (i also really like lou wilson's commentary on this theme as a black man)

you may note from these above examples that the one does not necessarily promise the others. cthulu (2007) holds very few story beats in common with a shadow over innsmouth, for example. similarly, frankenstein (2025) changes large portions of victor's origins and many beats of how he ends up creating the creature to begin with—including completely rewriting elizabeth to be not his childhood-companion-slash-cousin-slash-adopted-sister. i definitely sympathise with people who say elizabeth is a bit disrespected by the film, but i would argue that this is kind of intentional when del toro was clearly emphasising victor's father issues, the cycle of abuse, and the misogyny inherent in the hubris of "i want to create all by myself, without a woman—you know, the gender who are the ones who do the gestating and childbirthing." your mileage may vary on the first two, but the misogynistic hubris (and how it ties into the terror and responsibility of parenthood) is very much a central theme of the original text.

another yoke around the neck of adaptational decisions comes from the internet, and the fact that this is an age where anyone can splurge their opinions over several websites (myself included). subsequently, there has been a tendency to focus on fidelity of story above all else, for fear of angering fans.

i think it's important to separate fans of works who want exact adaptations because they especially enjoy the story, versus fans who want everything to be the same for the sake of it all being the same. you can, to my mind, love a story/character so much that you miss the wood for the trees, and can become blind to genuinely interesting or transformative changes.

for example: helen and clytemnestra are identical twins in nolan's odyssey.

and in the cases of those fans, i do think it's a pretty artless way of looking at adaptation and transformation. in the same way the translation from homeric greek to english is required to take some creative liberties due to each language not having one-and-only-one translation for each of the other's words, a translation from book to film will never be exact. and none of that is to say that translations are artless—there are several paragraphs above with me explaining why that is simply not true—but is does speak to a certain lack of curiosity, and a rigidity that could as easily be a story's undoing as its strength.

for example, project hail mary (the book) spends several chapters with grace making deductions to eventually determine yes, he is in space. this works for a written story on a page because there is the slow dread of him not knowing where he is, and the suspense of him slowly working it out lends some good tension. contrast project hail mary (the film) and, well, we all know what a spaceship looks like, we can all see he has been brought out of some kind of stasis. there is no question as to where he is, so spending fifteen minutes watching him parse it out would be frustrating instead of tense. so, he looks out a window.

and i think that's a nice analogy for both translation and adaptation. a story exists in the minds of the people who create it, in an opaque sphere with a single window through which anyone can view it, and make their own inferences based off what they can see through this one window.

1 - the revenge quest

a revenge story is... fine. it's fine. i know this one was based on a pre-existing comic, but i haven't read it, so i can't comment on accuracy. however, as a story introducing a character (mainly ruthie but also kind of kara, as we haven't really seen much of her yet), liberties are going to be taken, and i would argue internal logic is more important.

this revenge story is kind of stock, but i think the greater issue is it focusses a lot on ruthie (who i liked well enough, but she's another new character we quickly have to get invested in), and it feels quite rushed, in the sense that the audience is meant to fill in gaps that do not fall as naturally as the writer clearly assumed they would.

the clearest example is that it's obvious you're supposed to view ruthie as an 'earlier' version of kara. kara is someone who has been or used to be consumed by revenge, but has instead sunk into her grief, and she is trying to warn ruthie away from that, to make this version of herself take the other, better path. okay, fine.

except for two things.

one, kara isn't really dealing with a thirst for revenge. she cannot point to a single person/entity/system as the "reason" for her family/planet dying. they died because of kryptonite in the soil and because krypton exploded. like even if there was a single person (or even a group of people) to blame, they are dead. kara is dealing with grief and apathy, ruthie is dealing with revenge and anger.

also, ruthie is so fuelled by revenge the whole film, you never really see her uhhhh grieve?? we never learn her mother's name, or her brother's. i don't even think we see her cry?

two, there is a much better character who could be a foil to explore all of kara's complicated feelings about grief and the loss of krypton: clark! you know, the guy whose arc in the last film touched on how important it is to care about things? to be human, and not shut yourself off from emotion? and, while i did like ruthie, if kara's foil had been clark, we wouldn't have had to spend time setting up another character, so we could've focussed more on kara.

another fill-in-the-gaps that didn't really work was that the entire time kara was insisting to ruthie that revenge eats people alive, i couldn't help but think that it was extremely obvious that the universe would be a better, safer place if the bad guy was dead.

now, ruthie is also a kid who shouldn’t have been forced to grow up by the death of her family, and she shouldn’t be forced to grow up ‘more’ by killing a guy. that's understandable, and a good message, but kara’s argument the whole time is "it won't bring your family back" which falls flat when the guy ruthie’s after is comically evil.

and they kind of touch on it's-objectively-better-if-he's-dead right at the end, because kara does, in fact, kill that guy. but between the fact kara never mentions that "killing for revenge" and "killing to protect" can be different things, or ruthie never says something like "he killed my family, he will be with me forever regardless" or "i don't want anyone else to suffer at his hands like i/my family did", it feels a bit half-assed.

and to be clear, i don’t think this tween girl should shoulder the burden of killing a guy, but i think it does ruthie’s character a disservice to not tell her “yeah no we should absolutely kill that guy, but you’re a kid, so it shouldn’t be you” and then the fact he’s dead and can’t hurt anyone else is part of ruthie’s healing.

instead, kara explicitly kills krem because he shot her dog. no mention of the girls he was kidnapping for sex slavery. no mention of that family he murdered on bilqis(?). no mention of how many people will be saved/safe if he is gone.

like how are we not meant to interpret that as a revenge killing?? if the film is about kara getting over her apathy, make krem’s death about ruthie and those kidnapped girls!

for me, the best line in the movie (and it's seeming thesis) was: krypton didn't die in a day. the gods are not that kind. and that is not a revenge line. it's an angry line, for sure! but it's not a revenge line.

2 - go forth and multiply

walk with me for a moment.

imagine: kara has come to earth. she cannot speak english and clark cannot speak kryptonian. kara does not know that clark has rejected his parents' plan for him to propagate and repopulate the kryptonian race. as clark tries to explain to kara what he does, and how he has both a human identity and a hero identity, it is a very small leap for kara to misconstrue what he's saying, and assume clark has embedded himself as a hero in this world so he can rule it. as in, "oh my god, you're getting them to love you".

even if the writers didn't want to have a temporary misunderstanding subplot like this, kara still knows from her parents that her uncle, clark's dad, was weird and wanted his son to be a conqueror. and, as someone from a dead planet, she would theoretically understand (if disagree with, as clark did) the impulse to want to repopulate at all costs.

this film, as it stands, gives kara a LOT of opportunity to reflect on her grief about krypton through the lens of the impending extinction of the kryptonian race, and it does absolutely nothing with it.

the main antagonist is attacking women to forcibly repopulate his own planet/race. this is obviously bad, but if you excise the "kidnapping and sex slavery" part, there is a genuine debate to be had on whether individual members of a species/culture have a duty to continue that species/culture. a debate that this movie doesn't even touch.

even more strange, a sex-slavery-kidnapping-ring is a very dark subplot to shove into your movie if you're not going to do anything with it. when ruthie/kara learn of this, their stakes or personal investment don't suddenly increase. the primary motivation remains Save Dog and Have Revenge, despite the fact it actually would have been very narratively tidy for ruthie to let go of her revenge quest for her family, but choose to kill the guy anyway to save and protect the women being abused. it also would've been narratively understandable for kara to initially reject ruthie, but then realise there are dozens of other young women at risk, and get choose to get involved on their behalf.

instead, the sex slavery thing is seemingly just used as shorthand for These Guys Are Bad (as if this wasn't plainly obvious from how they murdered ruthie's family in cold blood) and these kidnapped young women are just generic civilians who Need To Be Saved.

ruthie and kara also at one point call the kidnapped girls "the brides" and on a personal level that was a bit gross. like come on now

and like, okay, the film is about kara learning to care again, so it makes sense she would initially be disinterested in these trafficked women, fine. but the fact that kara kills krem and outright says it’s for her dog and ruthie only shows that she has come to care about ruthie (which we’ve seen since kara first got involved in the bar fight). the women are, again, nameless civilians who need to be saved to add a bit more tension in the third act and give characters something else to do outside of Big Fight.

and, you know, i'm glad these women are saved, but given kara A) is from a dead planet B) is a woman, and therefore would be biologically responsible for pregnancy/childbirth in any relationship she might one day have C) has a cousin who was literally given a "repopulate the race By Any Means Necessary" mission by her crazy uncle ...i would expect her to have some kind of commentary on this specific plot point.

how cool would it have been if the brigands were not immediately revealed as antagonists? maybe kara meets one of them, it's even a kind of conventionally-attractive guy, and we're lulled into a false assumption that he's an ally or even a love interest. they commiserate about dead planets and being doomed to watch/be the ends of their races. and then he tries to kidnap kara, or she sees his buddies kidnapping other women and she realises these guys will go to reprehensible lengths to try and preserve their species.

or, kara could have instead been approached by the mother of a kidnapped young woman, or maybe even ruthie's parents were killed and her sister was kidnapped, but she herself escaped.

kara is even arguably in a worse situation, because the brigands' planet is "dying but not yet dead." they still have some remnants of their culture, and enough members to prolong the race if they can find enough spouses willing to populate with them. kara and clark, meanwhile, are only two individuals, and also closely biologically related. krypton blew up and the only fragments of the culture that remain are what kara has in her own head, and bits and pieces in clark's fortress.

also, when it comes to Space Stories, race and culture are almost interchangeable concepts, so "are you morally obligated to continue your race?" can easily become "are you morally obligated to continue your culture?" and from there i think the ethical line gets a whole lot fuzzier, so the narrative line gets a whole lot jucier. think of all the real-life examples from history where an oppressive force has sought to systematically erase a given culture. there's so much richness there (and it's even been explored in fantastical works like in avatar the last airbender, where abilities are passed down as well as knowledge) but this post is already hideously long so i'll move on

basically, this plotline could have provided so much more opportunity for kara to explore her grief over krypton and what she would be willing to do to bring it back, or even just to preserve it for another generation. instead, it takes a backseat to the fact kara is out to rescue her dog.

i like the dog! but it's not exactly narratively complex. it doesn't tell us anything about the character other than she likes her dog, and the fact krypto is her only living remnant of home is only briefly touched on.

3 - kara's relationship with clark

so, i have a theory that the reason this film was a guardians-of-the-galaxy style adventure-in-space, and not set on earth, was the writers/director/studio wanted it to feel like supergirl and not superman 2 by having david corenswet be too present.

and i get that. in many ways it feels like a phase one MCU film. you have iron man, you have captain america, and you know they're both building towards a convergence point in a later film, but for now they're separate entities.

but in this particular case, i do think it hampers what could've been a really deep, rich, complex story, because clark is probably the most interesting foil kara could have. kara's relationship with her cousin has two major facets that would've made for a more interesting story, and i really, really hope the reason they weren't touched on in this movie is because they're being saved for sequels or something.

the first one is slightly-less-valid because it's kind of moot for the purposes of this film series' canon, but i still think it bears mentioning, and that's the fact that, in some iterations of the character, kara is actually biologically older than clark, but was suspended in time for some reason when their pods-to-earth were separated, causing her to freeze while clark aged from an infant to an adult.

now, i do not begrudge the film for not wanting to explain time-bending bullshit and just use kara's original backstory, but i do think the choice to make kara straight-up younger than clark and having never met him before she came to earth flattens her potential quite a bit.

if teenaged kara had been sent off in a pod alongside baby clark, she would've essentially been given a mission by her family/clark's family to protect and raise him and keep a bit of krypton (and more relevantly, krypton's culture) alive a little longer.

however, when she gets caught in suspended-time-nonsense, she arrives to earth to see her baby cousin is all grown up and does not need her. he has a support system on this planet, a family who loves him, and now he is helping her. kara has not only lost her purpose, she now feels as though she has "failed" the final mission her parents and planet gave her. she has let them down, and now the absence of krypton feels all the more crushing.

additionally, this means kara herself now lacks a support system of her own. clark is the only person she could have talked to about krypton's destruction with the hope/expectation of some genuine understanding—except not really. clark's self-perception is famously "country boy from kansas", and while it contributes greatly to his moral code, it also represents a lesser-discussed part of the immigrant allegory he embodies.

which brings me to the second, more relevant point about kara and clark's relationship: kara and clark are both immigrant allegories, but they are also very different immigrant allegories.

clark is fully-integrated into his adoptive culture. he is "culturally human", and his film emphasises that this is a good thing. hell, superman as a character was created by two jewish men, a very blatant "immigration is good and no person is illegal" type message. no complaints from me.

however, more interestingly, clark is also entirely separated from his "birth culture". he doesn't speak kryptonian, he doesn't know krypton's history or social norms, and he also fully rejected his parents' desire for him to be a conqueror and continue the kryptonian race. his solo film ends with him essentially disowning his birth parents to accept his adoptive family as his true family.

again, no complaints from me. as far as i'm concerned, clark's parents are weirdos. but clark has no way of knowing that this desire of his parents was unusual (or at minimum, not universal) within krypton. clark is not only entirely separated from his home culture, he has essentially completely rejected it. "superman" is the kryptonian with the fortress of solitude and the phenomenal cosmic powers, but clark kent is not superman. superman is a mask he puts on so he can help people without sacrificing what he sees as his true self.

contrast all that with kara, who is basically a first-generation immigrant and a diaspora member. she grew up on krypton (sorta), surrounded by kryptonian culture, speaking the kryptonian language. she very much feels connected to and part of this culture that she is not only now separated from, but is completely gone. as far as the films have demonstrated so far, clark and kara are the only survivors of krypton's destruction, but kara is really the last member of the culture.

she is now met with the difficult tasks of adapting to this new home, its language and norms and everything else, and the allegory is heightened because of the onset of her powers; her outsider status is made obvious, as is the undertone that she could easily be perceived as a threat. clark gives her a colourful suit explicitly so "people will know we are good."

and yes, i know the more intentional meaning was the through-line of "you don't have to be kind but you do need to be good", but it also reads as a reference to clark's justifiable fear of himself and/or kara being seen as dangerous

it will be easier for kara on earth if she just assimilates entirely, and forgets krypton, and "becomes human". she can have a support system and feel like she is part of something. but when the entire weight of her culture's history sits on her shoulders and her shoulders alone, the idea of integrating anywhere else might, understandably, feel like betrayal and abandonment.

the end result of this is almost an allegory for being mixed race: a member of two cultures but simultaneously feeling part of neither. kara's character would lend itself very easily to a struggle of how much to "be" human and how much to "be" kryptonian, compacted by how she only knew argo, the final whimper of krypton's once vast and impressive civilisation. is she "truly" kryptonian, because she was born on a fragment that could be saved? that doesn't matter, she has to be, because she's all krypton has left.

and she would understandably come into conflict with clark about this, because he loves being human and clearly thinks krypton is kind of weird.

so you would get this interesting dynamic of kara not wanting to adjust to earth, with clark being frustrated because he finds it so nice and so reassuring/comforting/helpful. alongside that, you'd have kara not wanting to speak to clark about her grief because it's too painful, coupled with her reticence to speak about krypton with clark because A) he doesn't really "get it" and B) he seemingly has little-to-no interest in learning about krypton.

and over the course of the movie, you could see them try to broach a comfortable middle ground on each of these points. from what we see of clark's character, i'm fairly sure he'd like to learn about krypton (i get the impression he has, like, a polite interest, but not a deep fascination), and he would definitely want kara to feel like she could speak to him, but there is nothing to suggest he would consider himself kryptonian. he is very human, and very proud of it. he is the "ideal" immigrant: he works hard, he does good, and he bears no hints to his foreignness. he is completely assimilated.

and i think kara would find that a little terrifying, as well as deeply sad.

anyway so yeah this has been a freakishly long post about supergirl (2026). the story was disappointing but i love kara and i want to see her in several more movies, and i want to see her interact with clark especially.