Venture away from ‘The Odyssey’

“No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it. ‘ The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.” – George R.R. Martin

2026 has been a very bad year for classic literature on film. Wuthering Heights, Animal Farm, and The Bride all gleefully defecated on the graves of the original authors. Now it is Homer’s turn in the barrel.

For months ahead of its release, The Odyssey had many people tossing in their two drachmae. The filmgoing public largely treated it with contempt and derision while the press and professional critics have gassed it up as the year’s greatest achievement. I’d like to think that I primarily side with the consumer, and do I in this case? You bet your γλουτός.

When a Christopher Nolan joint is vastly inferior to a Hallmark TV miniseries from 30 years ago, something is amiss.

Watching the glowing reviews, I wanted to leap into the screen and shout “What the Hades is the matter with you?” Objective wrong after objective wrong were ignored because of, um, I don’t even know. Nolan fellating, political correctness, ignorance of/apathy towards the source material, something else entirely. What I do know is that I’m not playing that game. Time to release the kraken on this blasphemous blunder.

It’s the Age of Bronze (as the dialogue very inorganically lets us know) in Greece. Just like the great cinematic characters such as E.T. and D-Fens, Odysseus (Matt Damon) just wants to go home. The king of Ithaca, he’d been at war for so many years, ultimately succeeding against Troy (though the Trojan Horse attack gets presented as some kind of Charlottesville/Jan 6 allegory). He and his crew of redshirts set sail, but will be delayed by storms and misadventures.

Back home are his wife (Anne Hathaway) and son (Tom Holland) anxiously awaiting his return, but face troubles of their own. The citizens don’t share their faith, believing Odysseus to be long dead and that someone needs to fill his shoes. The most brash and megalomaniacal of them occupy the royal home, demanding that the queen remarry.

Though the old miniseries – directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola and Fred Fuchs – left some things out and was hamstrung by the limits of television, it was overall a superlative representation of the material. This film actually runs for just about the same amount of time, yet leaves out even more (Anticleia, Odysseus’s mother, is completely absent, as is the Phaeacian royal family, among others) and is filled with, well, filler. Flashbacks within flashbacks that are utterly pointless (we do not need to waste time showing someone simply firing an arrow), action beats dragged out too long, gazing shots of sets which were likely more expensive but not all that appreciably better.

The key events we remember from reading this in high school English (hope I’ve done you proud, Mrs. Rich) are here, but terribly executed in such a half-assed manner as to miss the entire point. Take, for instance, the encounter with Polyphemus (Bill Irwin in Kane Hodder/Doug Jones mode). As just implied in the parenthetical, this character is predominantly mute. That means he does not talk to Odysseus and the whole “Nobody” thing, perhaps the most memorable bit in the entire written work, never happens. A scene intended to show our hero’s cunning cleverness but also damning arrogance ends up doing neither.

These half measures extend through the picture. The unpoetic dialogue is mostly properly formal but every so often tosses in words far too modern and/or crass. The gods are almost entirely removed from the story; the (intentional) comic relief is nonexistent. Calypso (Charlize Theron) acts more like a therapist than an imprisoner and the lotus eating gets crowbarred into her section. That fits there as well as a Laestrygonian fits into XXS pants.

Some aspects are given focus for historical accuracy, yet others are outright ignored. The armor and ships seem to be from different time periods and cultures. Orchestras didn’t exist back then, but apparently Botox and Benetton did.

Which brings us to the core reason for all that contempt and derision: the cast. Let’s be real here, this is an awfully asinine assortment of absurdly arbitrary actors. I would say that it’s a cast like my high school’s demographics, except my high school actually had Greek people there.

As I’m sure has already been shouted from the rooftops and amplified, the number of Greek-descended people in the principal cast is an almighty zero. I could fill a whole paragraph with actors of this extraction who could’ve been in the movie, so I’ll do just that.

Jennifer Aniston, Dave Bautista, Marie Avgeropoulos, Angie Harmon, Hugh Jackman, Tracy Spiridakos, Nicholas Galitzine, Zach Galifianakis, John Stamos, Theo James, Nia Vardalos, Tina Fey, Elias Koteas, George Chakiris, Costas Mandylor, Louis Mandylor, Gia Carides, Zoe Carides, Kristen Vaganos, Billy Zane, Chris Diamantopoulos, Jason Mantzoukas, Rita Wilson, Sofia Milos, Melina Kanakaredes, Hank Azaria, Zoe Kazan, Michael Chiklis, Peru Kavalieri, Constantine Maroulis, Nick Cassavetes, Maria Menounos, Anthony Skordi, Elena Kampouris, tons more that aren’t coming to the top of my head right now.

Were all of these people completely booked through the whole period of shooting? Not a single one could have been squeezed in somewhere? 

To make matters worse, the actors who were chosen are so haphazardly applied that a good number of them perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Zendaya as the magic negro (appearing alongside the two white stars from Legend of Bagger Vance, no less), Corey Hawkins as a buck aggressively pursuing the white woman, Mia Goth as the devious maid, Himesh Patel as a would-be h̶i̶j̶a̶c̶k̶e̶r̶ mutineer, Lupita Nyong’o as a passive battered wife (to my recollection, this is not in the original text; similarly, Clytemnestra is her sister, yes, but not supposed to be a twin).

Others do not find the right notes for their characters. Robert Pattinson’s suitor is a basic schoolyard bully, Elliot Page’s (who starred in one of my favorite PS3 games,  Beyond: Two Souls, which was about a female character that had a male spirit within that wanted to be let out in the world – interesting metaphor there) supposedly gung-ho soldier comes off a tad timid, Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon registers only as a costume.

All of that said, however, there is something here that could have explained the anachronisms and BS casting. At the very start of the picture, there’s a bard (Travis Scott) recounting the Trojan War. Now, a framing device with an unreliable narrator is a good way to explain historical incongruities (see Amadeus), but I wrote “could have” two sentences ago because that isn’t at all what was done. Whenever he’s shown, this character is right there alongside all of the others in the palace while the plot is still going on. What’s more, he’s cut off from talking right as he starts, so he’s not telling anything and is just a useless presence.

Given that we have the miniseries, there are exactly two main reasons to want to see this material redone for the big screen: violence and nudity. On the first count, the film is lacking. There are more scenes of combat, to be sure, but they are not significantly gorier. It’s the same bloodlessness typically seen in PG-13 fare (which I’m convinced this movie was intended to be but slid in a handful of f-bombs to secure an R to seem “serious”).

Now let’s talk about sex, all the good things and bad things that may be. Or let’s not, because this is a big 404 error. Seriously, this movie is so neutered that it makes the Hallmark version look like Caligula. Why on Zeus’s green earth would you hire actresses like Theron and Hathaway (add in Samantha Morton as Circe, another part not done justice to), known for some of the best nude scenes ever put on film, and have them keep their clothes on?

At the end of it all is a set of names, which isn’t the credits so much as it is a list of people who should repeat the ninth grade. In that spirit, Δεν τους δίνω κανέναν βαθμό και είθε οι θεοί να σπλαχνιστούν τις ψυχές τους.