Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lrb.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 183 posts

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

#41

Post by Daz912 »

watwut wrote: post #27
throwaway3060 wrote: post #19

I am not an expert in this space, so hopefully an actual expert will come by and clarify, but I am pretty sure that "The current consensus [...] is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’" is just flat out untrue. (IIUC, what is the current consensus is that they did not "cause" the late bronze age collapse). That colors how I read the rest of the review. Edit: Personally, I enjoyed that particular addition…

Willson is actual expert. I also think that it is ok to be unrealistic in myth movie.

[dead]

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

#42

Post by dsign »

It's a movie for theaters and not a flashback edgy post; the success of the work is about pleasing the audience. That is already a thing in Homer's original Odyssey, at least as I read it in high school. But now with a few more decades on my ribs, I can quickly find out that the text that I read came from oral traditions that spanned from 1200 to 600 BCE, and after finding its way to written form, a cultural chain of transliterations:

Archaic Greece -> Hellenistic Alexandria[^1] -> Roman Egypt -> Byzantine Constantinople -> Renaissance Italy

Each age was obsessed with something, and the latest stages in that chain are heavily marked by Christian values. So, yeah, swords and explosion and stuff and don't do anything we would consider obscene today which includes sex, though movie directors are completely unabashed about bloody horror. To me, it's not a reflection on the director, but on his audience and their society.

[^1]: https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103T4T

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

#43

Post by close04 »

class3shock wrote: post #4

I'm not a scholar of Greek history but as layman, I thought it was good and good enough to recommend. Visually it is quite beautiful and despite what the review states it does have an ethical thread at its core it follows. There are some choices I just don't understand; the armor, mostly the Trojans and Agamemnon's, looks like something that would be on a low budget scifi tv show and jamming a bunch of well known cel…

Some people see the movie as the typical Hollywood fiction and in that light you can only judge it in isolation. Good action, solid characters.

As the screen adaptation of a work written about a real person, you’d need to have the prerequisite knowledge of history, the written work, the person.

These are very different points of view. If you didn’t know better you could enjoy a movie portraying Trump and the ICE (insert whatever real life situation fits your country better) as unsung heroes, reluctantly doing what is necessary to defend the land from foreign invaders. Once you get a glimpse of the history, the fiction is harder to enjoy.

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

#44

Post by forgingahead »

It was a good entertaining movie. I found all the online right-wing hysteria about this really silly and stupid. The moral of the story should actually appeal to reasonable moderates everywhere: Zeus's Law, whereby strangers (refugees/immigrants) are welcomed, should not be taken advantage of, ie when the strangers (refugees/immigrants) misbehave and spit in the faces on their hosts, lest they break the culture and tolerance that allowed them to be welcomed in the first place.

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

#45

Post by ks2048 »

squidsoup wrote: post #2

> "The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality". A pretty succinct summation of Nolan as a filmmaker.

I found a lot of Nolan's films overrated, but just got out The Odyssey and would say it was quite good. But, yes, "grandiosity" is true - in IMAX, it was loud and intense.

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

#46

Post by niekiepriekie »

kombookcha wrote: post #33
class3shock wrote: post #4

I'm not a scholar of Greek history but as layman, I thought it was good and good enough to recommend. Visually it is quite beautiful and despite what the review states it does have an ethical thread at its core it follows. There are some choices I just don't understand; the armor, mostly the Trojans and Agamemnon's, looks like something that would be on a low budget scifi tv show and jamming a bunch of well known cel…

Personally I thought that the odd looking fantasy-armor was an interesting way to highlight that what we are seeing is a story, not history. As highlighted by the storyteller in Odysseus' palace. But I think it also ties in thematically with the heroes-and-monsters aspect. 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 so…

Very much agreed. I found the part about Agamemnon very well done. He's a mystery for a long time and then that very short homecoming.

Awesome.

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

#47

Post by antonvs »

nickcw wrote: post #39

[after a pretty scathing review which I mostly agree with] > 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…

> "doing his best to get the general public reading again"

This seems very detached from reality. I very much doubt that many people seeing a movie like this will think "oh, I should read The Odyssey", or "I should read more." And most people who try the former are unlikely to get very far.

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

#48

Post by 4gotunameagain » 

   The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.
It wasn't enough for Emily Wilson (an upper class white British American woman) to include black people in the cast, they should've been the protagonists.

Can you imagine if a film adaptation of the Epic of Sundiata had white actors ? The whole western world would stop spinning.

I really wish all those senseless racial tensions of the US had not spilled over to the rest of us.

Nobody in France would bat an eyelid if a movie had white only cast, as nobody would bat an eyelid if a movie had black only cast.

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

#49

Post by jf »

When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".

Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.

When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":

  Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: 

  What was the artist trying to achieve? 

  Did he/she succeed? 

  The third's a zinger: 

  Was it worth doing? 

  Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.

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

#50

Post by antonvs »

mi_lk wrote: post #29

Well the author, an expert in Homer, doesn't hold punches that's for sure. It also shows a literature critic doesn’t really translate into a film critic because this piece is borderline pedantic about the adaptation script and not the movie as a whole.

It's similar to when Neil Tyson criticizes a scifi movie.
Post reply on HN