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Hacker News
Sometimes simplifying a story makes it more accessible, but there's always a risk of losing the depth that made the original timeless.
The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.
Can you imagine if a film adaptation of the Epic of Sundiata had white actors ? The whole western world would stop spinning.
I really wish all those senseless racial tensions of the US had not spilled over to the rest of us.
Nobody in France would bat an eyelid if a movie had white only cast, as nobody would bat an eyelid if a movie had black only cast.
I enjoyed her translation. Also really liked the movie. 10/10, trying to rewatch in IMAX without having to take front row seats.
by cocacola1
Well the author, an expert in Homer, doesn't hold punches that's for sure.
It also shows a literature critic doesn’t really translate into a film critic because this piece is borderline pedantic about the adaptation script and not the movie as a whole.
by mi_lk
[after a pretty scathing review which I mostly agree with]
> Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.
by nickcw
It's a movie for theaters and not a flashback edgy post; the success of the work is about pleasing the audience. That is already a thing in Homer's original Odyssey, at least as I read it in high school. But now with a few more decades on my ribs, I can quickly find out that the text that I read came from oral traditions that spanned from 1200 to 600 BCE, and after finding its way to written form, a cultural chain of transliterations:
Archaic Greece -> Hellenistic Alexandria[^1] -> Roman Egypt -> Byzantine Constantinople -> Renaissance Italy
Each age was obsessed with something, and the latest stages in that chain are heavily marked by Christian values. So, yeah, swords and explosion and stuff and don't do anything we would consider obscene today which includes sex, though movie directors are completely unabashed about bloody horror. To me, it's not a reflection on the director, but on his audience and their society.
by dsign
"But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before."
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Odysseus, in the poem, is a bit of a monster by modern standards. He's intemperate, devious, unfaithful, greedy, and excessively violent in all the very human ways that modern Hollywood heroes aren't. Homeric Greeks were basically pirates, and not the Hollywood kind either! One of the epithets commonly applied to Odysseus in the poems is "sacker of cities", and that's in a very literal sense.
Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get into the mental space of the bronze age Achaeans. In a three hour movie that's a lot harder to do.
by beloch
When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".
Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.
When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":
Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward:
What was the artist trying to achieve?
Did he/she succeed?
The third's a zinger:
Was it worth doing?
Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.by jf
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- Hacker News
- Sometimes simplifying a story makes it more accessible, but there's always a risk of losing the depth that made the original timeless.
It wasn't enough for Emily Wilson (an upper class white British American woman) to include black people in the cast, they should've been the protagonists.The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.Can you imagine if a film adaptation of the Epic of Sundiata had white actors ? The whole western world would stop spinning.
I really wish all those senseless racial tensions of the US had not spilled over to the rest of us.
Nobody in France would bat an eyelid if a movie had white only cast, as nobody would bat an eyelid if a movie had black only cast.
- I enjoyed her translation. Also really liked the movie. 10/10, trying to rewatch in IMAX without having to take front row seats.by cocacola1
- Well the author, an expert in Homer, doesn't hold punches that's for sure.
It also shows a literature critic doesn’t really translate into a film critic because this piece is borderline pedantic about the adaptation script and not the movie as a whole.
by mi_lk - [after a pretty scathing review which I mostly agree with]
> Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.
by nickcw - It's a movie for theaters and not a flashback edgy post; the success of the work is about pleasing the audience. That is already a thing in Homer's original Odyssey, at least as I read it in high school. But now with a few more decades on my ribs, I can quickly find out that the text that I read came from oral traditions that spanned from 1200 to 600 BCE, and after finding its way to written form, a cultural chain of transliterations:
Archaic Greece -> Hellenistic Alexandria[^1] -> Roman Egypt -> Byzantine Constantinople -> Renaissance Italy
Each age was obsessed with something, and the latest stages in that chain are heavily marked by Christian values. So, yeah, swords and explosion and stuff and don't do anything we would consider obscene today which includes sex, though movie directors are completely unabashed about bloody horror. To me, it's not a reflection on the director, but on his audience and their society.
by dsign - "But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before."
----------
Odysseus, in the poem, is a bit of a monster by modern standards. He's intemperate, devious, unfaithful, greedy, and excessively violent in all the very human ways that modern Hollywood heroes aren't. Homeric Greeks were basically pirates, and not the Hollywood kind either! One of the epithets commonly applied to Odysseus in the poems is "sacker of cities", and that's in a very literal sense.
Were Odysseus played as written, modern audiences would have a very hard time empathizing with him. That's the real challenge to successfully adapting the Odyssey. When reading the original, you have abundant time to get into the mental space of the bronze age Achaeans. In a three hour movie that's a lot harder to do.
by beloch - When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".
Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.
When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":
Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third's a zinger: Was it worth doing? Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.by jf