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Is an evergreen take on Nolan's movies for me.
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Yes. It's often hard to hear the dialogue.
Glad it wasn't just me/the theatre I went to... Somewhat fortunately there were Spanish subtitles (I'm in central America), so I read those at times (side note, I can't fathom how anyone can watch any dubbed movie. Subtitles or don't bother)
Agree about dubbing.
I read about 2/3rds of this before giving up. People who are upvoting it: what are you getting from this review that I'm missing, exactly?
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…
I’d agree, but would argue that Nolan has a unique (almost Delphic) talent - for better or worse - amongst contemporary Hollywood directors for capturing and reflecting contemporary and near-future textures and preoccupations, and this alone makes his work more interesting, and worthy of critical attention, than your comment seems to imply if I have interpreted it correctly. I think that’s just as true of his lesser…
Just to be clear. This is the same director who interpreted Occupy Wall Street as Batman’s Bane.
I don‘t dispute his talent, but this talent of his speaks to conservative, pro-establishment, values. If you don‘t share his conservative values, it is very easy to see how his interpretations are at complete odds with contemporary textures and preoccupations.
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Wilson wrote in great and excruciating detail about why she chose “complicated” as the translation, yet you dismiss it as if if was some sort of casual, thoughtless decision: https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated Rest assured that she’s given more thought to every single word in that poem than almost anyone else alive. Wilson’s translation is in my reading queue before I see the film, but whether I like it o…
Translating the Odyssey is not some new thing. There are dozens of other translations in English, and yet pretty much all of them have put just as much or more effort into questions like these...and yet few are as artless and bland as "complicated." If you actually spend some time looking into scholarly discussion of the translation... it's seen as quite deficient and indeed cuts out a lot of meaning in the original…
Compare the opening lines:
Fagles:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
The Fagles translation is much more lyrical without being overly pompous or florid, and the McKellen audio version (which is the way the story was first told, right?) is delightful. Reading along as McKellen tells the story is a joy.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/16/a-voyage-of-di...
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 (ins…
Stretching credulity a bit there.
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This is insightful but entirely tangential to the heart of the quote you posted. "... the Homeric poems easily clear the bar [of showing the perspectives of both victims and perpatrators]" Homer's writing was very empathetic to Odysseus's victims. The movie sanitized the tragedy. This quote is also easily misinterpreted: "But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagin…
I did not read the odyssey yet, but I just finished the illiad and there the Warlords are measured in how much livestock they stole and Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share, which is measured in women. Hectors wife is worried about her husband, and he tells her, that there is nothing to worry about, when he is dead, because if he dies, the city is sacked and she would become a slave and this woul…
"And tall Hector nodded, his helmet flashing: “All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman. But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy and the Trojan women trailing their long robes if I would shrink from battle now, a coward. Nor does the spirit urge me on that way. I've learned it all too well. To stand up bravely, always to fight in the front ranks of Trojan soldiers, winning my father great glory, glory for myself. For in my heart and soul I also know this well: the day will come when sacred Troy must die, Priam must die and all his people with him, Priam who hurls the strong ash spear . . . Even so, it is less the pain of the Trojans still to come that weighs me down, not even of Hecuba herself or King Priam, or the thought that my own brothers in all their numbers, all their gallant courage, may tumble in the dust, crushed by enemies — That is nothing, nothing beside your agony when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears, wrenching away your day of light and freedom! Then far off in the land of Argos you must live, laboring at a loom, at another woman's beck and call, fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia, resisting it all the way — the rough yoke of necessity at your neck. And a man may say, who sees you streaming tears, 'There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter they could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans, long ago when the men fought for Troy.' So he will say and the fresh grief will swell your heart once more, widowed, robbed of the one man strong enough to fight off your day of slavery. No, no, let the earth come piling over my dead body before I hear your cries, I hear you dragged away!”"
> Achilles gets mad about not getting his fair trophy share
He's mad because he is camped out on a beach for a decade helping Agamemnon, which he has no obligation to do, and Agamemnon steals his sex slave for little reason and tells him to fuck off. Achilles then refuses to war for this guy, very reasonably.
I think you must have skimmed this book very rapidly because you seem to not understand what you read.
> The Homeric epic was already an adaptation. The poem used a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions [...] Can someone explain this one? I understand that 'The Odyssey' as a canonical work of literature can't predate the alphabet. But what she writes here makes it sound as if the written poem is just a loose adaptation of existing mythical traditions. I thought the c…
The story is from the 12th century BCE Mycenaean Greece. I think most scholars agree some of the people actually existed, and that some of the events did indeed take place. It was then told mouth to mouth for the next 6 centuries, as in the late Bronze age collapse the Greek culture lost their alphabet and couldn’t write it down.
In the 8th century BCE Homer composed the epic from these stories. The Greek culture had just adopted a new alphabet and his poems were written down relatively quickly after it was composed. Having an alphabet to write down the composition gives you a certain freedom when composing, as you don‘t have to compose in a way that every word will be recalled from memory (compare this to e.g. the poetic Eddas which didn’t have this luxury; and also the Prose Edda which did).
"A complicated man" is a stupid translation in the first place Polytropos means: a man of many twists and turns, describing simultaneously a person who has traveled widely and been "turned" by many hardships and places, as well as someone whose mind is clever, resourceful, versatile, and cunning enough to turn any situation to their advantage Or as W2 academics chasing book reviews and podcasts slots translate: "a co…
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 ab…