1. It's a fun action movie. A line that got cut but sums up some of my overall feelings: This Odyssey is not a rich, satisfying Homeric banquet, but sometimes in the heat, an ice-cold Philly water ice is all you want - even it's mostly sugar and food coloring, and makes no nutritional sense.
2. Adaptations can do whatever the creators want with the source material, and in many cases, the more they diverge from or push back against the original, the better. e.g. I love Wild Sargasso Sea (and I also love Jane Eyre).
3. It's also totally fine to use American actors and a diverse cast. The costumes/ armor/boats are a mess, but who cares? Homer is also a mishmash, and see point #2.
4. It's less fine to waste your expensive diverse cast by terrible screen-writing, giving them zero convincing characterization or attempt to make us care about the relationships, and tokenism.
5. Adaptations are often most successful when they make clear, courageous choices about what to leave out - so, for instance, the movie "The Return" seems to me both a much more radical departure from the original source, and also a more successful film.
6. Nolan tries to pack a lot of Incidents and Big Ideas into this film, but they do not seem to me to hang together coherently on the level of his own plot and the movie's constructed system of values. Instead, it's foisting a didactic point about Our Times onto the plot without integrating it.
7. The film centers Odysseus's guilt over his war crimes, but never shows us the POV of his victims, and instead glorifies the perpetrator for feeling bad about himself. I found this unsatisfying ethically and worse, imaginatively, because Damon's character is given only one moo
7. I liked Nolan's low-budget early films - have seen Memento 3 times - but I think the money is a trap. It's easier to suspend disbelief if the actors are less famous. The huge budget leads him to attempt grand jam-packed epics, when he's better at taut, very premise-y small films.
8. I wish I liked this film more. I tried very hard to like it. I also felt it was valid to write about why it didn't work for me - especially since so much of the coverage has been so very positive, and I'm hardly punching down.
9. By far my favorite thing in the film is Robert Pattinson's hilarious and sexy Antinous. If anyone ever wants to make a spin off TV series with Antinous risen from the dead to mess with other mythical households, I would be so there for it.
10. Whatever one thinks of the film as a work of art, it's doing some good in the world, by generating big conversations, bringing new audiences to the cinema, and new readers to ancient literature. I hope it helps save the humanities.
11. Was I too mean? Or not mean enough? I went through my first draft and tried to take out the snark. To quote the great poet: "Though much is taken, much remains... That which we are, we are."
12. Beyond anything about the film as a film, it was a terrible and entirely unnecessary choice to film the Trojan Horse sequence in occupied Dakhla, Western Sahara, without the consent of the indigenous population.
Yes, it is Wide Sargasso Sea and yes, the Tennyson line is “though much is taken, much abides”. Many apologies and thank you for correcting. And thank you to all who read and engaged. I am very happy that some people respectfully disagreed with me, or had different feelings about the film from mine.
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