An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

r/askhistorians, which as far as I know is reliable, does not seem to dispute that they at least existed. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1mwbdpd/why_...

Edit: Charitably, it could be awkward phrasing - not that the sea peoples didn't exist, but that the whole hypothesis around them is believed to be off.

The first we see of Agamemnon is his crazy armor with the golden spine running down the back of the helmet, and it immediately establishes that some people in this story are much larger than life, so much so that they seem sort of monstrous and offputting. Agamemnon looks like Darth Vader, striding forward in that black and gold armor. And in a way, Agamemnon has made himself a monster to achieve his personal ambition, sacrificing his daughter at the outset. When he's later killed in bed by his embittered wife, it's in maybe the one scene of the movie where we see him without his armor - having returned home and stripped it off. Perhaps he thinks he can be a person again. But he is no longer the man he was, and his home too has become hostile to him. In making himself a legend, he has shut himself out from the life he had.

More broadly, he (and the kings who went with him) has perhaps even destroyed that way of life entirely by violating larger social contracts, such as taking Troy by a deceptive offering to a shared god. Which is the core shame that's hounding Odysseus through his trials (along with some survivor's guilt).

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. It felt both familiar and fresh at the same time, and made a lot of initially odd seeming choices that I wound up finding interesting and thematic.

Big recommendation.

Because it should've been done as just one movie. Someone got greedy and decided to split it up into three movies, and it was such a drag watching all of them - and I say this as a huge LotR fan who enjoyed all the extended LotR cuts.

The other big issue was the frame rate of the movie, 48FPS was a risky move and didn't really translate well to the big screen, it felt like everything was sped up and was hyper realistic.

The CGI was also bad and hasn't aged well, like if you watch LotR now it still looks pretty good, whereas the the monsters in the Hobbit look like some 3D printed figurines covered in oil, or have an uncanny valley effect.

In fact there was so much wrong with the movie that it's easier to just list the good things (which, for me, was the music).

> Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.