I’ve just come home from my local cinema, where I have seen the new Christopher Nolan film, The Odyssey.
Just saying, I read the poem when I was fifteen. Then a friend who had a copy of The Iliad lent it to me and I lent her my Odyssey.
There have been quite a few film interpretations of the Homer poem. A couple of them, at least, are up on YouTube, Armand Assante’s The Odyssey, 1997, and Ulysses with Kirk Douglas. Oh, and I see that The Return with Ralph Fiennes is there too. If you don’t mind an updated version, O, Brother, Where Art Thou? is set in the 1930s US. That one, of course, is a comedy with singing.
There was so much fuss made about this one before anyone had even seen it. Most of it was about the role of Helen of Troy being played by Lupita Nyong’o, a stunningly beautiful black woman. How DARE they! Never mind the fact that Helen was a daughter of Zeus, hatched from an egg laid by her human mother when she was raped by Zeus as a swan. Nobody complained about that, did they? And by the way, Zendaya played Athena, a Greek goddess, and she has an African American Dad. Can’t have that, can we?
Greeks were annoyed that there were no Greek actors in it. But how many Greek actors were in the other versions?
Recently there are people demanding it be boycotted because some of it was filmed in Western Sahara. Look it up. There is a clip on YouTube.
Never mind. I just decided to go and see it and make up my own mind.
And I was impressed. It was visually stunning and beautifully performed by the cast. The special effects were amazing. I found myself caring about the characters, which is vital to me.
How faithful was it? Well, it did go through most of the stories from the poem - the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, Circe, the visit to the Underworld, though it left out the bits with his mother and Achilles, who said he would rather be a slave of a peasant on earth than a king in the underworld.
But Achilles was not in this film, as he was dead before the Trojan Horse incident, which was shown in flashbacks. Fair enough. And he told his story to Calypso, the goddess who had kept him for seven years, instead of the Phaeacian court. In this film, Calypso was sympathetic with his situation and let him go without complaint. In the poem she was annoyed at being ordered by the gods to let him go. But in this film she did admit to having kept him for seven years.
The Kirk Douglas version did have him telling his story to the Phaeacians, and even had Achilles say his piece in the Underworld. It didn’t bother with Calypso. It started with Odysseus (bearing the Latin name Ulysses) finding himself shipwrecked in Phaeacia. Antinous, the villain suitor, was played by Anthony Quinn. If you are a fan of Robert Pattinson, you’ll get the chance to see him playing the nasty Antinous, though this version has him as a young man who got out of going to Troy by swapping places with Sinon whose peasant family agreed, to get some much needed money.
Matt Damon, who played Odysseus, grew a beard for his role, apparently, rather than let them give him a fake one.
Tom Holland had to do another American accent for his role as Odysseus’s son Telemachus. It was a bit much for me, though, when Telemachus called his mother “Mom.”
Like every other film version of the story, the dog Argos was in it, having waited for his master for twenty years. In both this film and the Kirk Douglas version, it’s how Telemachus recognises his father. Not in the poem, but never mind. The dog recognises his master and wags his tail before finally dying. It was touching, as always, especially as this version shows a flashback in which Odysseus chooses his puppy.
For some reason, Odysseus never seems to run out of arrows!
I liked his relationship with his second, Eurylochus, who didn’t have any problem with telling him off.
Anyway, I enjoyed it and so did many of the film critics. Highly recommended.
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