[epiphainie]

printing this out and putting it on my wall for 2026

[unusualshrimp]

religious odyssey: odysseus and his men have angered the gods and now they are being struck down

atheist odyssey: all the suffering was a combination of human cruelty, chance, and odysseus trying to control things

agnostic odyssey: no one knows why odysseus's men were so fucking stupid

[elbiotipo]

"warm, shallow seas" is one of the most beautiful phrases in paleontology and it's everywhere... these mollusks lived in warm, shallow seas... scientists think that photosynthetic life evolved in warm, shallow seas... in that era the Earth was covered by warm, shallow seas...

I wish I was resting by an antediluvian warm, shallow sea

[malinaa]

[cerusee]

Okay. For my money, the entire thesis of Chris Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey is that society chokes and sputters and dies when we abuse, ignore, or violate social norms like the laws of hospitality. That is not really what The Odyssey (the book/poem) is about, but I can clearly see why in the horror that is the 2020s, someone could read The Odyssey and go oh my god that’s a lot of bad dropping in. That’s a lot of bad visits. That’s a clear vision of how the loss of social norms and cohesion fucks you up and how war, literal, brutal war, is a terrible wound that destroys your humanity and your understanding of what civilization and society is. I don’t know that the iteration of Greek society that ultimately birthed the poem would agree with Nolan’s take, but I think this movie is quite ideologically coherent, that Nolan knew exactly what he was trying to say with each and every adaptational change, and I think he wasn’t nuts for using one of the most famous classical western civilization works as a way to make that argument.

[smilingformoney]

I have so many thoughts about Nolan’s Odyssey

- 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

[unusualshrimp]

i have detailed thoughts on the actual movie too i just wanted to hero worship a little first because im very happy :) #mydirector #myfavourite

[unusualshrimp]

also famous people don't need to announce their opinions all the time, but i HAVE been vaguely worried about nolan for a long time, because i'm so tired of artists i felt connected to turning out to be shitty people. and we know basically nothing about nolan and he's a rich white guy so yknow. so for him to come out with this movie and very clearly spell out that he thinks trans people are cool and competent and and war is horrible and we need to learn from the past and stop..... yeah it really got me lol. felt like getting a hug

[unusualshrimp]

i can't make gifsets even if i tried rn because i dont think the good quality version is available online yet but OUGJHH I NEED to show everyone the parallels. i was losing it in the theater. what do you mean they used the giant whirlpool's own spin to steer away from it. what if i exploded

[unusualshrimp]

last night was so insane, this is why im in love with the film medium so much because i can See how nolan was thinking about interstellar while making this and I'M thinking about interstellar while watching this and i know that he knows and he has left specific little references for me to connect and AAAGHHHHHH it's like he's in the room with me but even closer than that it's like for 2 hours and 52 minutes we are sharing the same mind. how does this happen

[unusualshrimp]

interstellar really was nolan's magnum opus, not in the sense that he won't make anything that good again, obviously he has. but everything he made before seems like it's leading up to it, and everything he has made since feels haunted by it...... god

[stephfandomdumps]

oh em GEE! it's not accurate?? can you guys wake up homer? find his corpse and ask him what he thinks? was he the first writer of the odyssey? or was he the first person to write it down? did he exist? lets wake up the first ever bard to think of the odyssey! who is he? oh we dont know? that sucks. did you guys ask ovid? did you talk to hesiod? or sophocles? does mythology have one definite story? or does it evolve over time across centuries and milleniums? is there one true translation? or version? dont stories change? should nolan have stood there for 18 hours and recite it in ancient greek while you guys ate food? oh wait sorry thats not accurate. he should speak for one hour over dinner and then you guys come back for 17 straight days and listen for an hour at a time. oh wait sorry that wrong too. he hasnt mastered speaking classical greek. oh wait no one speaks that anymore, no one alive does. let's wake up and find euripedes' ghost too. and aeschylus. and apuleius! cant forget that guy. oh but wait they all lived hundreds of years apart and all told different versions of the different mythologies and added their own messaging and ideas. and they left out other parts too. according to you guys thats not allowed. god forbid. oh sorry. gods forbid.

[jhelp-the-fig]

can I say something.

I actually do not give an actual fuck about (most of) the perceived inaccuracies and adaptive flourishes of Nolan's Odyssey and I think that some of you need to understand that stories can be good even if they are changed to fit a different thematic structure. I simply do not care about perceived mischaracterizations of one of history's oldest blorbos: Idgaf that it didn't include the Nobody detail when Odysseus' connection to the gods is tenuous and his sponsor god/the personification of his guilt wears the face of an innocent murdered as a result of his violations. His defining character traits are established much differently, and in my opinion, serve the medium far better. I think that some of you need to stop the rehash and enjoy a piece of art that claims inspiration, not accuracy.

also the whinging about these kinds of adaptive details is kind of like christians getting upset about jesus christ superstar.

[mysharona1987]

[kaafii]

The Odyssey (2026), dir. Christopher Nolan

[folklorelei42]

⚠️THE ODYSSEY SPOILERS⚠️

the fact that either as a hallucination-type manifestation of his guilt or athena herself, the goddess of wisdom and strategy, chose to wear the face of a young girl who was needlessly killed due to a winning strategy is one of the best choices in the adaptation imo

[breealtair]

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.