tumblr is only for people who r weird and a bit lonely and had a strange interest when they were 12 that led them here. if none of those apply to you like genuinely what is there for you here
‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ Mel grits through her teeth, hoping if she allows her frustration to take precedence it’ll mask the fear that threatens to take control. ‘What’s happening?’
‘What’s happening is that today is yesterday and yesterday is today. And tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after that.’ Frank keeps on gesturing as he trails off, a continuous motion that makes Mel feel sick. ‘One of those infinite time loops, Groundhog Day kinda situations,’ he shrugs.
Her vision blurs for a moment, everything in sight doubling before suddenly snapping back into place in aggressive sharpness. ‘Am I hallucinating? Are we both hallucinating? Are open air gas leaks a thing? I know we’re not too far from the hot springs, maybe they're emitting mass amounts of carbon monoxide. We should probably evacuate the area, just in case.’
‘I think the odds of mass psychosis are pretty low, so… no.’
Spiders have three life cycles. When between cycles, it can leave the spider vulnerable to threats. And for those spiders who make it through, it amounts to a kind of... rebirth.
SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY
In Theaters Now | dir. Destin Daniel Cretton
I cannot imagine the shock you must feel being handed such a burden, and so unexpectedly. I can offer you nothing but an apology, and a promise that I will do my best to return to you as soon as possible in order to relieve you of tasks I am sure you find unpleasant at best (at worst, I shudder to think). I wanted to offer you security, not responsibility, sweet Melly, and I regret that circumstances have forced you into a scantness of the former and too much of the latter. Please give the children and Becca my love and tell my mother I think of her often—and if you would pray for my dear brother's soul along with mine tonight I would be much obliged to your graceful kindness—yours affectionately, F.L.
i do in hindsight really love the concept of complaining about adaptational changes in a 3000 year old oral tradition of which there isn’t really a definitive version so much as a surviving one that is also the most adapted story of all time. my chud forebears in Roman Britain throwing rocks at a bard going nah nah nah the last one said some different other shit at that part you gotta do it again is a comforting image to me
also this hadestown proshot is what made me realize that hades literally built all that stuff in hadestown FOR PERSEPHONE SO SHE'D WANT TO STAY like SHE'S the reason he made it artificially hot and bright!! he's trying to mimic summer so she doesn't leave!! how did I not realize this before????
ALSO i knew the reason orpheus could finish the song was because he finally understood the fear and doubt hades has every time persephone leaves BUT I DIDNT REALIZE THAT THE TRIAL HADES GIVES WAS ALSO BECAUSE HE UNDERSTOOD ORPHEUS AS WELL!! like hades knew he'd fail because HE'D fail!!
also also I know there's a Thing between hades and eurydice but I didn't realize that there was also one between persephone and orpheus until now, and I think it's intended to show that they're foils of one another, that pre-seasons hades was more like orpheus and pre-seasons persephone was more like eurydice and that their focus on orpheus and eurydice is because they remind them of what they had (and think they lost) - the love o+e have for each other reminds them of themselves, and so hades wants to take eurydice away/lock her away and persephone wants to protect orpheus/let him escape because they're trying to prevent them repeating their own mistakes in their own ways
like the slime tutorial did not give me these revelations, all musicals need professional recordings for this reason!!
I like The Odyssey well enough, but I love movies. And it's zero percent surprising that Tumblr would love Emily Wilson's LBR piece, because it's just premiere posting. Her prose fucking crushes, so many lines are absolutely killer. But I do just need to mention that it's really not film criticism. It's hardly speaking to or about the movie at all, and when it is, it's predominantly her positing that because she is not interested in what it's saying, then it's not saying anything.
I mean if you just want to take, "There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible." This line makes me laugh every time I see it, it rules. And it has nothing to do with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026).
Presumably it's coming from the same complaint well as the majority of Wilson's piece: that while the Homeric poem is a celebration of fucking around and feasting, this movie is not. But in just saying, "it's not this" and nothing more, she's not discussing or even acknowledging how sex and food are actually used in this retelling. Both are tied together in what has been widely praised among audiences as one of the most indelible sequences: Samantha Morton's scene as the witch Circe. In it, the threat of sexual violence and act of eating are linked in a commentary on warmongering rapaciousness writ large, as a part of Nolan's intently laid out thesis of the Trojan horse as a kind of atomic bomb xenia violation whose nuclear winter the whole Mediterranean is now living under. And yes the food does look horrible, because it's horror food! It's difficult to describe in words, but it's like the stew Odysseus's men are eating is turning into gristly tentacles in their mouths, the sounds of their eating ghastly and so disgusting, while Morton transforms them through....something I will not even try to describe, I've just never seen anything quite like it onscreen. Largely practical effects too, astonishing.
Not a bit of that is in that line, of course. Great line, but isn't about the movie, it's about the author.
And honestly, the author is a bit out on a limb with much of how she has actually interpreted The Odyssey (film) itself, must also be said! And not just by me, or by film critics naturally, but also other classics scholars:
Emily Wilson used baffling arguments to flay Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem.
I mean when early on she summarily defined the work of cinema as "light and noise" and moved on, it was pretty clear that Wilson just doesn't have a ton of respect or feeling for epic scale movies in general. Which is fine! Everyone has types of art that they don't jibe with. But you don't go to the person who's not keen on dance for a good assessment of the new ballet, negative or positive.
And if one of the things someone claims about a movie is that casting actors of color flattened all of those roles into the stereotypical "Black best friend," but not by anything that can be seen in the script or their performances, so seemingly suggesting 'we', to use her skeptical punctuation motif, should read them that way merely because they aren't white, worth a pause to consider that while haterism can be a rush to read (or write), it can also mask any number of deeply iffy assertions that could definitely stand to be questioned!
I think a few people came to this conclusion as well, but I realized after getting to watch Hadestown proshot, that the villain of the musical isn't Hades. It's the Fates. Eurydice dies because they take her things. They try to discourage Orpheus twice, succeeding the second time. They convince Hades that no matter what he chooses, he'll be either seen as weak or a monster. Your own fate is often scarier than any beast or king.
i think this proshot also made me realize how similar hades and orpheus are. at the same time hades is telling persephone how much he's done for her (how much he hasn't listened to her and is just doing what he THINKS she'll like instead of paying attention to what she's saying and what she needs) at the exact same time orpheus is distracted by his song and not paying attention to what eurydice is saying and what she needs. what she's begging him for, what she's crying out to him for. he's so wrapped up in his own mission and his job that he forgot to listen out for the person he loves most. hades knew orpheus would turn around because that's exactly what hades himself would do
I'm gonna be honest, I fuck with a movie that's all about the collapse of a society that perpetuates certain morals and laws that itself is not willing to uphold when it comes to interacting with the rest of the world.
The Greeks used the excuse of a woman and the war of gods to wage war with an economic competitor, then showed up on their enemy's shores and broke their own laws of hospitality to win the war and ransacked the city and its people. The story of those actions traveled the world, making everyone afraid of the "people from the sea," even the Greeks who WERE the people from the sea.
The suitors cried about the laws not being upheld for them but were unwilling to uphold them themselves. The same society was terrified of this invisible enemy that would invade because of their lack of morals, unaware that THEY are the ones who broke the laws first. They are their own boogeyman. The fear of foreignors was never about the actions of foreignors but their own actions.
The gods haunt the narrative as an ideal. If they were confirmed real, then this movie becomes a warning against breaking away from "the correct religion." Instead, it is a warning of how mutual care and respect for your fellow man, whether gods exist or not, is the backbone of society, and without it, morality becomes something to twist and fear monger.
The gods couldn't exist in this adaptation, so a lot of the plot points involving the gods had to be changed or left out. "Nobody" only matters if Odysseus doxxes himself for poseidon to punish. (The crew members insisting that they definitely heard the cyclops say posiedon and jumping to the conclusion that he was poseidon's son and they were cursed was a great change in my opinion.) The wind bag can only exist if the gods exist. Athena can only guide Telemechus and Odysseus if the gods exist. ("Athena" potentially only being Odysseus's guilt for the preistess he let die who only shows up in times where his actions in Troy are thematically important was *chef's kiss*.) The Trojan War is only a war sanctioned by the gods if the gods exist. Odysseus being stuck with Calypso for so long needs another reason (the lotus) if it's not by the will of the gods. What would Circe and Calypso be like if they weren't eternal goddesses? Did the crew go to Hades, or did they just perform a spell that raised the dead?
Magic and Monsters can still exist without the gods, and everything else can be explained by superstition, nature, and bad luck. The ideal of the gods haunt the narrative so wonderfully.
I'm not a fan of Nolan's directorial aesthetic, but for the themes he wanted to explore, I think this was a fantastic retelling of the original. Accuracy isn't and shouldn't always be the goal. Sometimes, taking an existing story and making something new in order to speak to a different aspect of humanity is all we can really hope for.
This doesn't mean people HAVE to like it. There are plenty of "good" movies that I do not enjoy watching. However, acting like it's an objective thing to say that this was a failure of an adaptation is very annoying. It's a subjective opinion of art.
- The body horror of Circe transforming the men into pigs was beautifully disgusting
- I loved how the existence of the gods was never fully confirmed or denied. Were the storms Poseidon’s wrath or just bad weather? Was Athena appearing to Odysseus with the face of the woman he let die or was he hallucinating out of guilt? Magic clearly existed, because we had a cyclops and a witch and shades of the Underworld, but there’s magic and then there’s divinity. Is everything they say about the gods true or are they just an excuse?
- The removal of the Nobody scene was necessary actually. In the poem, Odysseus gives Polyphemus his real name in a moment of hubris and this causes all the problems later on because now Poseidon knows the name of the man that disrespected him. In the film, the problems are caused by the Greeks breaking Xenia by invading Troy. Keeping the Nobody scene would have detracted from the root cause of all the problems.
- I could write an entire essay about how cleverly Nolan uses events from the Odyssey to make a point about today’s society:
The Trojan War was about trade routes and Helen was just an excuse — just as wars today are waged for oil and resources, and governments give excuses to their citizens to make it seem better.
“The people from the sea” are feared as an invasion of bogeymen threatening innocents, but they’re actually just desperate men trying to find safety.
The Greeks pillage an island and ask “why didn’t you just give us what we wanted? We’re the good guys!” while the village burns behind them, not realising that to the villagers, Greeks and Trojans are all the same.
- Whoever let Anne Hathaway freeze her forehead should be fed to Polyphemus
- I hope Tom Holland escapes Marvel soon because he is a damn fine actor
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