omg it's the odyssey hour!!

The only movie I have cared about in years and what I thought of it

Me and Tanya went to see the Odyssey movie with Emily at the Coolidge Corner movie theater, and we also went to the Harvard Natural History Museum, and it was all a real hoot [hoot]. I maintain that movies are a bad form of popular media and certainly my least favorite. I will be spoiling the Odyssey poem and the Odyssey movie.

The worst thing about the Odyssey movie is that it's incredibly loud and should be quieter. I'm sure they also could have stood to cast some Greek actors in a movie about Greece.

The director of the Odyssey movie has, very amusingly, made the Odyssey movie about the Bronze Age collapse. The characters are always worrying about the growing threat from the "people from the sea" (sea people), and then at the end of the movie, Penelope says something along the lines of, "will people sing about our story in the future?" and Odysseus says, "they will have to because they will not be able to read after civilization collapses." IT IS REALLY FUNNY BECAUSE IT IS TRUE BUT ALSO SURELY NOT WHAT SHE WAS ASKING. There is a sense throughout that the world as the characters know it is ending because their world has become hostile and adversarial and the bonds that hold society together are breaking. Places such as home that used to be safe are not safe anymore, and you can no longer trust that anyone else is going to not kill you. Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling? It is their own fault because they have pillaged and been bad guests and then expected that they would wash up on someone else's shores and be treated well. I like it so much when Penelope asks Odysseus if he's a sea person and he says yes (I was always told he's a pirate). Previously in the movie, he tells the victims of his distasteful actions that he isn't a sea person, he's a Greek. But I guess the real sea people were inside us all along, and the real Bronze Age collapse was the friends we made along the way. 

This is not really my preferred genre of end of the world story because, although I do sometimes feel like the world is ending, I feel very strongly that it isn't my fault. Nevertheless I think the way the movie discusses the Bronze Age collapse and the end of the world is good and interesting, and all of the creative liberties it took to support its discussion of collapsing values/the end of the world can be justified on that account. 

I dislike that the characters say that xenia is important because your guest could be a god; your guest could be a god, but it's much more important that guest friendship is the principle that keeps people safe from each other, especially in foreign lands. I have no idea why this was not the way they framed it because it would contribute to the themes I have been discussing. I also dislike that Melantho is meant to be a traitor who is romantically involved with Antinous and selling out Odysseus's family because THE SLAVE GIRLS ARE NOT THE VILLAINS AND IF THEY WERE INVOLVED WITH THE SUITORS THEY PROBABLY HAD NO CHOICE. I heard tell that this movie was "based on the Emily Wilson translation" (this is a nonsensical thing to say because the Emily Wilson translation is not meaningfully different from any other translation in terms of the actual story being told, and it's not like he copies all of her dialogue) (I have been MIFFED with the internet discussion of Emily Wilson, but I respect her immensely and I merely regret that (with all respect to feminism) some feminists on the internet who DON'T KNOW WHAT THE ODYSSEY SAYS IN GREEK are using her as a symbol to bash male translators when she doesn't say such things, and they, again, DO NOT KNOW WHAT THE ODYSSEY SAYS IN GREEK), but it is clearly not even based on the Emily Wilson sentiments because she would never have accused Melantho of treachery like this. I also think the sirens didn't make any sense. I don't know what they told him. In the poem, they tell you everything people are saying about you behind your back. Obviously this is incredibly tempting. I don't think it's what they told him in the movie, and I can't imagine what would have been more tempting. Also the cyclops's eye should have been rounder because cyclops means circle eye, but that man's eye was elliptical. I am okay with basically every other creative liberty in the movie.

My favorite thing about the Odyssey (in my own reading) is that Odysseus is not really a victim on the same level as, say, Trojans, but he is so emotionally fragile that he can't imagine himself as anything but a persecuted hero and will not think straight or consider anyone else's feelings if he sees them as a threat. I think I will discuss this at further length in my next Odyssey review, which will occur after I finish reading the poem in Greek. This Odysseus is such a good guy. He feels bad about things; he even seems to feel sorry for sacking Troy (which is completely extratextual). He does not even cheat on his wife as long as he is in a mental state to remember she exists. They have made him sympathetic to modern sensibilities, but I guess I have already said I'm okay with all of the creative liberties I didn't already complain about. I just want to say that it's extratextual for him to be sympathetic to modern sensibilities. In the poem, he is a wicked pirate and a crybaby and I love him. 

I liked Penelope and I thought she was a good enigma. I also want to say that, again, it is extratextual for Penelope to be rude to Telemachus and not the other way around, but if I wanted to complain, I would have to have done that two paragraphs ago. Penelope's second dress is awful for her character. That is just a modern dress. I don't know a single thing about ancient armor so I can't speak to any of that. I suspect the costumes were not accurate, but if the ancient Greeks were making this movie, they probably would have also been pretty anachronistic. 

When Odysseus first called himself Sinon, I heard him say Xenon, and so did Tanya. I don't know why he would have given himself a grammatically neuter name, but if he did give himself the pseudonym Xenos, that would have been an amazing joke because it means stranger or guest. Speaking of Sinon, I was so chuffed that any of Tiresias's book 11 prophecy was included, even though they gave it to Sinon and took out the part about people who don't salt their food and haven't heard of the ocean and think an oar is a winnowing fan, whatever that is. They made this change so that Odysseus and Penelope would be sailing off into the sunset at the end of the movie instead of riding donkeys and embarking on a tedious land journey. The underworld field trip scene was so good and looked really cool. 

The Odyssey movie was edifying for me for basically two reasons. One theme that the movie keeps is Odysseus being a totally illogical exception to the way things should clearly go; he shouldn't get to come home and he shouldn't get to smash things and magically solve his problems. In the poem, he is not so much better than the rest of his men that only he should survive treacherous problems, and the situation facing him at home is so troublesome that it's completely unrealistic (and only occurs because of Athena's divine intervention) that he should be able to fix his homecoming, as it were, by killing everyone he doesn't like. His home has changed and he has changed, so why should he be able to return home without any consequences? Likewise in the movie, he is just as guilty—and maybe more guilty—than the rest of his crew for doing senseless violence and creating a dangerous world where people try to kill each other, and his crew suffers the natural consequences of their actions, but Odysseus doesn't, and he gets to run away from THE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE with his clever and beautiful wife. Odysseus gets to cheat death because he is the protagonist, and, even though the story is trying to communicate a general principle that, after experiencing great trauma or ruining society, things are never going to go back to the way they were when you were safe and happy, we still get to imagine that Odysseus is the exception in his story to the general rule, and we might also like to imagine that, if we are the main character in our own lives, we can also be the exception. 

When I was in high school (I am speaking now of the second edifying feature of the movie), I watched a Youtube series by the good people of the Extra History channel about the Bronze Age collapse. They talked about this event in a very engaging way as if they were telling a story, and I remember being very disappointed because we don't know what caused the Bronze Age collapse—whether it was a disease or sea people or something else—and this is inevitably not satisfying from the narrative perspective in the video series. And then we talked about the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization in my Greek history class, and I think it was agreed that the most likely reason of all was systems collapse (is I think what it's called) because the society was very centralized and became unable to support the economic interactions happening between the palace and those surrounding the palace, so everything sort of went to pieces. But still no one knows exactly why so many ancient civilizations (because it was not only Mycenaean Greece) collapsed around the end of the first century BCE, and maybe no one even knew at the time what was happening on the grand scale. The Odyssey movie is obviously not serious scholarship on the Bronze Age collapse, but it is a really satisfying narrative that comments on the sea people and the Bronze Age collapse, and it has sort of resolved the unease I felt when I first watched the Extra History videos and have felt ever since. Many years ago, I began hearing the story of why the Bronze Age collapsed, and no one ever gave me a resolution that felt satisfying (BECAUSE WE DON'T KNOW) until Christopher Nolan told me that the Bronze Age collapsed because the sea people were inside us all along. I think I am going to sleep a little more soundly tonight. 

WHY DID THEY BUILD THE TROJAN HORSE SOMEWHERE THE TIDE WOULD COME IN?? ARE THEY STUPID?? 

The Odyssey Movie ⭐⭐⭐⭐