I came back from watching the Odyssey
You guys, it wasn't so bad lmao
Honestly I was expecting something so much worse, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it
The problem is that everyone and their mom has an opinion about the Odyssey but nobody has read it lmao
First of all, I'm not mad about the movie being anachronistic because Homer himself was anachronistic, he was mixing things here and there, but I would've liked to see more color and different clothing choices.
I wasn't even mad about the nobody thing, because you see, there was only one (1) cyclop, so the nobody trick isn't necessary at all, and while Odysseus doesn't shout his name, he goes back and shoots him with an arrow because, well, hubris, so I guess that was all good, I think they didn't have money for more cyclops, so it was fine by me
Now the things I didn't like were Odysseus and Athena's personalities
Because Odysseus gets made into this heroic noble figure, and he wasn't like that, I think the point of his character is that he survived the war, not because he was young, kind or noble. No, all the characters that were that; like Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, died. Odysseus survived because he was smart and he wasn't afraid of stabbing someone in the back when he needed to.
Actually there's a theory that the Odysseus of the oral tradition before the Odyssey existed as it is today, was probably worse and Homer or the poet of the Odyssey made him more noble, and yet he still isn't the moral hero that he is in the movie
Honest to God if Nolan wanted to do a character that was noble and heroic like that, he could've made an Iliad movie with Hector or even Patroclus as the protagonist
Actually, a lot of themes of the movie, like the consequences and brutality of war, would've fit better in an Iliad movie lmao
But making a movie about the Iliad is so fucking difficult and everyone prefers the Odyssey anyway lmao
About Athena, I disliked that Nolan portrayed her as being sad about the fall of Troy and taking the form of a woman they killed to remind Odysseus of the war, like no
For starters Athena was number one hater of Troy, she was on the side of the Greeks and wanted to see Troy burn, second, she wouldn't have cared
One thing about the Iliad and the Odyssey to some extent, is that Gods truly don't care that much about humans unless is a personal offense, like Athena cares (to an extent) about Odysseus because that's her poor little meow meow, her blorbo if you will, but if Zeus had said "this bitch dies in the war" Athena wouldn't put her neck on the line for Odysseus.
You can see the juxtaposition of scenes where the Gods are having a good time with scenes of humans being massacred in the Iliad just to drive the point that they truly don't care. So Athena being sad about Troy, I didn't understand why. Like, if you wanted to show someone being sad, maybe have Odysseus hallucinate Hecuba's ghost or Astyanax instead
And don't get me wrong, Athena was mad after Troy fell, but she was mad with lesser Ajax for raping Cassandra on her temple, and she killed Ajax, if she had been mad with Odysseus, Odysseus wouldn't have made it home lmao
So what was up with Athena being all sad for Troy? Again, there were better characters to show the pain of Troy than Athena, maybe none of the Gods but if you have cyclops and witches in your movie, you can put some ghosts here and there, not like Nolan wanted the story to remain unchanged
Finally, they keep repeating about the seafaring people or something like that (Idk, I saw it in Spanish because I went with my dad) and how these people were going to attack them and I was like "what the hell are these bitches talking about" because the seafaring people were the Greeks, the Achaeans
And then it turns out that yess, they are the seafaring people lmao
They also reference the dark age, a period of time after The Mycenaean civilization fell, and nobody knows much about it now because nobody back then wrote anything lmao
So I guess it was Nolan's "are we the baddies?" Moment
Because, that plus how all the characters were constantly talking about xenia, it felt like Nolan was saying "yeah, how we treat people that aren't like us in the west is fucked up and it's going to cause us a lot of problems later"
So I guess that message is fine, I don't know Nolan's politics but I would say he seems to be at least liberal; ironically enough I think it would've fit better with the Iliad than with the Odyssey lmao
At the end, it wasn't a bad movie, but if you are a nerd about the Odyssey, don't watch it