The Odyssey

Say Zues’s Law one more time…

I was gifted a perfect preview of this film before watching the latest James Cameron Avatar in iMax last year. They just showed a straight 5-10min of the Trojan Horse scene, uncut, from gifting to gating. It was the best preview I had ever seen: continuous music building, tension increasing, a crashing wave of resolution. If only the whole film had been like that.

There were some very lovely parts, as all Odyssey retelling tend to have. I loved Circe’s warping work, the landscapes of Calypso’s beach, the shores of Hades, the monologue of the Sirens’ call. But ultimately I felt it was just too poor of a script. Multiple moments had me reeling away from the screen, taken aback by phrasing that sounded like a first draft. “Civilization will rise again”?! Who speaks like this?

I had a thought after the preview: I had hoped that the film would be entirely disjoint, every adventure of Odysseus told as a story by someone else, to another character who would then tell another, out of order, and so on until they were all told. And then it could continue, on and on. Because I feel that would have embraced the character-as-moral-vehicle storyline I remember about the Odyssey. But instead here we get a straightforward and mostly beautiful unimaginative recounting.