The Odyssey is a great film hampered by its choices
After commenting on the marketing and previews for some months, I have seen the Cristopher Nolan's The Odyssey last week! I was already aware of some of the cuts of iconic bits, but this helped my experience: I was as underwhelmed by what I expected to feel underwhelming, but more impressed at what I expected to be impressive, so the outcome was certainly very much positive.
Many classicists and reviewers have suggested discussing Nolan's Odyssey in two ways: as a movie, and as an adaptation. In my simple layman opinion, I disgress: the movie is not a retelling through a new take, it's a straightforward adaptation of the Odyssey that follows its basic plot beats and structure. It does some great things with it, and it does some underwhelming things with it, but it clearly wants to follow the source material and should be judged as such.
I can't say much about the acting because I watched it dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese (everyone did a great job at it btw, I love Marco Antônio Costa as Odysseus) but everyone does a good job, though I didn't find anything outstanding. Eumaeus was my greatest positive surprise with the movie: he received a lot of care and love in a way I hadn't seen before, and his acting was very tender. The visual effects are amazing, with the sole exception of Charybdis which hardly gives the presence her threat required.
This is also a very smooth movie, which despite its length passes by like a breeze. The Lotus-Eaters, Aeolus, Nestor, and the Phaeacians are mostly cut, but they are probably the best options to choose to cut. I think Nolan proved it's perfectly possible to make a mostly accurate Odyssey movie in manageable time.
There were however four major points that prevent me from considering the movie an amazing Odyssey adaptation:
The movie's costuming direction is as bad as every trailer and preview made it look. Despite the deliberately historical setting, most characters wear drab and colorless long-sleeved shirts, pants, and leather boots. Nothing about the costumes resembles either Classical Greece — the period evoked by the soldiers' Corinthian helmets — or Mycenaean Greece — the Bronze Age era the discussion addresses. Nolan's Greece looks medieval; except that, at the very least, the Middle Ages still had fabric dyeing. Strangely, many characters in some scenes in flashbacks are seen wearing tunics, which only makes me more confused with the prevalence of pants.
The dark, colorless art style works for the decay of Ithaca and the terror of Hades, but why are the kingdom and royalty of Sparta—which ought to be flourishing following the king's return—equally washed-out? Wouldn't it have been better to provide a contrast between Telemachus's simple attire and the more expensive garments worn by Menelaus and Helen? Shouldn't Calypso's beach look flourishing as a golden cage? The movie has many levity moments too, so more varied colors wouldn't feel clashing.
This wouldn't be a problem if the movie were heavily stylized akin to 300, but it clearly wants to feel authentic to history, which is another issue of mine. Actors wear sweatpants in real-life ruins and flourishing Greek landscapes.
The mix of epic and history
The interweaving of the Late Bronze Age Collapse into the narrative felt clumsy. The movie follows the theory of the Homeric Epics as a cultural memory of the civilization collapse in the Mediterranean around 1200 BC by using the Sea Peoples as a plot point, but it does so without much care. The lack of authenticity in the rest of the movie makes it a contrast: it's the Bronze Age but no one wears bronze, the clothing looks more medieval than ancient, and some of the Trojan architecture is more brutalist than classical.
Had the movie been purely set in a timeless period there wouldn't be a problem, but this plot point ties it to real life in a way that the rest of the film isn't interested. The "our age of bronze is collapsing" line is particularly odd in its anachronism, as if Nolan didn't trust the audience to connect the dots and look up the Bronze Age Collapse at home.
I've seen many complaints that the movie's Odysseus is too moral. He is merciful, he dislikes war from the start, and he doesn't boast about his arrogance. However, I don't see anything wrong with that at all; adaptations don't have to abide to differences in morals across history, and I hardly imagine that people would be fine to watch Odysseus hang twelve slaves after they clean up the corpses of the suitors in a blockbuster. Nolan isn't the first to focus on Odysseus' more noble qualities.
My problem with this Odysseus isn't his morals, it's that he simply isn't very cunning. Moments like the "Nobody" trick and the wine offered to Polyphemus were cut, so Odysseus rarely displays the ingenuity and resourcefulness so unique to his character. Perhaps the worst loss resulting from this is Penelope’s own moment of reckoning, where she tests her husband by making a statement only he would know to be incorrect—a move that brings the story’s theme to a close. That moment of recognition is replaced by a pendant that fails to demonstrate her cleverness.
A much better option in my opinion would be to make Odysseus prideful of the sack of Troy at first and only after 10 years of loss does he realize the error of his ways. Rather, flashbacks show him being moved right ahead at the sack, which cuts short a potential character development. Is he really that guilty if he was drafted by force and regrets it immediately?
The Villainization of the Atreides
Again, there isn't anything wrong in making Odysseus more guilt-ridden and regretful about the horrors of war at all. My problem with this approach is that they make Agamemnon and Menelaus overly worse in the process. Rather than taking a nuanced approach, the movie simply cuts any motivation by making Menelaus an abusive husband and Helen an excuse to "control sea trade routes" (?).
In fact, I would argue that the villainization of Agamemnon is done well. We are told of his ruthlessness, but on-screen, he is nothing but respectable and friendly to Odysseus, which gives him nuance.
Menelaus, on the other hand, isn't granted this subtlety. He openly mocks his own wife in front of guests and there is even an implication that he disfigured her face. In my opinion, it would be much better to portray a failing marriage with fake smiles instead of an open arguement in which Menelaus mocks his wife's scars and Helen mocks her husband's brother on the faces of each other.
