Nolan is so ridiculous

[Bereta_Eder]

I knew when I entered the cinema that I would be seeing just another stupid holly wood movie and I was not dissapointed.

It was deliciously midiocre and I didn't know what was more prevelent: the immense cringe or the disbelief that such a stupid movie that has compleltey missed all the points of the Odussey exists now.

Might as well X - Men or some other kids' movie.

Deliously deplorable


Just one thing (god there are so many goof ups its hilarous)

You do know that homer NEVER specificallyh discrebied ΩΡΑΙΑ ΕΛΕΝΗ, beautiful helen.

why not?

because he knew that each man sees the ultimate beauty different;y and he didn't want to cut off anyone's imagination.

He never ver discribed her. Nothing of her physical attributes is known. nothing. not. one. thing.


Except this one: she has a white arms

[Bereta_Eder]

He could have went with a mongolianm dwarf with a wooden crutch and he would still have been more faithful to the original.

However this is only a minor laugh.

Odysseus wasn't at no given time gen z.

and greek tales do not get to be "Adapted" to whatever current situation is percevied to exist in any clown's mind.
They contain pnhuman dilemas and questions that remain unaltered and undiluted always pertinent to whatever the current fashion is because exactly they rest at the core of humanity.


what kid of jerk tries to turn kirki or poenelope into a femtx 6th gebneration feminazi suicidal squade

or make the greeks have remorse for that they did to the trojans?


i bet he hasn't even read the trojan women

a solid 6 (it would have been a 5 of not for the laughs of seeing an one eyed giant gollum )

[Bereta_Eder]

I think I have also to say something positive:

the settings were very good. the acting was very good. the overal "Adventure" feeling was good.
it had a nice pace, it didn't become boring.

But it wasn't the odyssey. I was primarily irked by the infantile level of its "philosophical dilemmas". Don't try to touch upon those if you don't know how. All you can do is sully them.

all in all It was a well directed "Adventure".

apart from that, indifferent

[Elok]

The funny thing about the whole Helen controversy is that Helen is about as irrelevant to the plot of the Odyssey as it is possible for a character to be. She was a living maguffin in its prequel; she could be dead or not be mentioned at all and it would have no effect on the story of this one dude getting lost on the way home from forcibly retrieving her.

Doing implausible minority casting then getting condescending when people object is, of course, generally ridiculous, even when they aren't giving us a Latina named Snow White. But the real issue is that there are lots of minority actors who understandably would like better roles, while risk-averse studio executives would prefer to keep mining the same proven-safe IPs they've been flogging to death for fifty-plus years. And those IPs are mostly about us honkies, so the only way out is to have a black Helen or whatever. Then you get disingenuously smirky when people call your retarded casting choice retarded, and nobody asks you to take a chance on producing more stories where a minority in a major role would actually make a lick of sense. The latter choice would also have the not-inconsiderable benefit of giving us new and interesting stories to watch ...

[Lorizael]

A black Helen is a "retarded" casting choice only if you are obsessed very specifically with skin color. It has nothing to do with racial or ethnic plausibility given... *waves broadly at the rest of the cast*.

[Jon Miller]

I looked up who they cast.

Lupita can play the most beautiful woman in the world. No problem for me.

JM

[Elok]

Not actually all that familiar with the rest of the cast, except that Zendaya is involved as Athena which is only a bad casting choice because Zendaya is just not that interesting to watch in the first place. And I guess Elliot Page is one soldier or something, which I guess means he is still working, good for him. And Odysseus is ... Matt Damon? Sure, why not. That pretty well wraps up what I know about the casting and I'm not going to google.

While there was a fair amount of ethnic diversity in the ancient Mediterranean, Lupita Nyongo'o is very plainly of sub-Saharan African ancestry and her being Helen is thus kind of a head-scratcher. Did the Spartans never wonder how the hell their ethnically Greek queen gave birth to a daughter who appears to have no genes in common with her or anyone else they have ever met? Or are we just ignoring all real-world geography in this Greek story full of Greek names and characters? This isn't a matter of "obsession" but of the actor not matching up to one of the character's exactly three given physical attributes (female, attractive, plausibly Greek).

If they're doing the modern-interpretation-of-Shakespeare thing and Telemachus is played by a Puerto Rican guy while Penelope is Asian then sure, that's silly too. This isn't really a big thing, minority actors want work too, fine, whatever, but I reserve the right to notice that it is, for the record, ridiculous.

[Lorizael]

This isn't a matter of "obsession" but of the actor not matching up to one of the character's exactly three given physical attributes (female, attractive, plausibly Greek)

No, it's definitely about skin color. In what way is Matt Damon, an American man with English, Scottish, Finnish, and Swedish ancestry, plausibly Greek? Or Anne Hathaway (Penelope), an American woman with Irish, English, German, and French ancestry? Or Tom Holland (Telemachus), a Brit? The answer is that, in 2026, all those ethnicities are subsumed into the greater category of white, and Greek is stuffed in there, too. Lupita Nyongo'o, on the other hand, gets put in the Black basket.

...Lupita Nyongo'o is very plainly of sub-Saharan African ancestry...

Would it be ridiculous for a sub-Saharan African film company to do a production of The Odyssey? Or an East Asian film company? This was produced by an American film company and helmed by a British director. It cast actors who work in Hollywood.

Did the Spartans never wonder how the hell their ethnically Greek queen gave birth to a daughter who appears to have no genes in common with her or anyone else they have ever met?

Her father is canonically Zeus, a god who frequently turned into a wide variety of different creatures when he chose to descend from Mount Olympus and impregnate mortal women. Should we be surprised that a semi-divine figure called the most beautiful woman in the world has remarkable physical features?

[EPW]

I thought the point of acting was to pretend to be another person

[BeBMan]

Freedom of expression also covers silly choices or some I just disagree with *shrugses*

In the end what's important to me is if a movie works for me, at least one some level.

[Elok]

There is a certain amount of pissing on my head and telling me it's raining here (on Christopher Nolan/Hollywood's part). I give it roughly 0% odds that Nolan just put out a casting call for "youngish pretty woman with prior SAG credit" and the black lady just happened to put in the best audition. This is not community theater where you have to take what you can get; he could have called for brown-eyed redheads, twenty to twenty-five, hold the freckles, like he was ordering Chinese takeout. He consciously chose to assign a black woman to the part of, famously, the most beautiful woman ever, presumably to make some kind of statement about beauty and racial standards etc. I don't know whether Mycenaean-era Greeks would have found her attractive, though I suspect not (our beauty standards are, in my experience, heavily informed by what we're used to). But it does annoy me that Nolan is allowed to make a statement, but we as the audience are not allowed to say that making that statement in the context of this particular film can only weaken it. Yes, yes, black women can be pretty, but this is simply distracting on a Watsonian/diegetic level; the Queen of Sparta is Kenyan and everybody is awkwardly pretending not to notice. Damon, Hathaway, or Holland do not look particularly Greek as such, but I suspect if you dropped any of them into Ithaka in 1000 BC they would be more or less visually unremarkable (unsure about prevalent hair colors prior to centuries of immigration in the Byzantine era followed by Ottoman rule, but IIRC the works of Homer refer to golden-haired Hellenes), whereas Lupita Nyongo'o would be comically conspicuous at 500 feet and people would assume she was foreign. While the average viewer is not going to have a firm idea of what phenotypes Homer was familiar with (before he went blind) it is plain on a gut level that ancient Greece didn't have a lot of black girls. This is obvious and I should not need to spell out the distinction.

I have never seen this movie and don't intend to, but this is an ongoing thing in Hollywood. Compare the second Dune, where the Fremen are cast as all different kinds of nonwhite people. I get the concept Villeneuve was gesturing at--we're serious artists doing a metaphor for Western colonialism, give us a cookie--but I saw them and immediately wondered why the people in this smallish, insular, largely endogamous community looked so drastically different from each other. The hoity-toity artistic statement makes the story worse on its own terms. Perhaps this is because we live in such an ironic, meta-aware, modern society or something, and expecting unbroken immersion is naive, but seriously, it's dumb.

[BeBMan]

As said in the other thread, haven#t seen it either yet. I do intend to.

Re Helen, I find it implausible to have her as black woman since esp. Sparta of all places was rather a closed society.

A while ago I streamed Gladiator 2, despite the visual spectacle rather forgettable overall. Denzel Washington's character there was one of the few better elements, and he didn't feel out of place as old Rome was way more "global" than old Sparta.

But that's about it, I notice these things, but it's not a crucial thing to me.

[EPW]

Oh no Elok is feeling persecuted again

[Bereta_Eder]

but IIRC the works of Homer refer to golden-haired Hellenes), whereas Lupita Nyongo'o would be comically conspicuous at 500 feet and people would assume she was foreign. While the average viewer is not going to have a firm idea of what phenotypes Homer was familiar with (before he went blind) it is plain on a gut level that ancient Greece didn't have a lot of black girls. This is obvious and I should not need to spell out the distinction..

errr. matt daemon playing being greek or the other barbarians (pun pun) is also problematic but I agree not as much. Homer refered to SOME greeks of that time as golden haired (namely achilles or the goddess of love aphrodite) but that's about it. It is funny how many greek texts refer to the liking of greek women to paint their hair blonde. There were big imports of that dye from syria or something. Also xanthos does not really translate to scandinavian blond.
At best daemon and that brit guy would be considered scythian slaves and put to work at various unpleasant tasks.

The good thing with greece is that since it was a vastly vibrant and strong civilization it left behind secure evidences of what people looked like, so the nazi/colonianist era or the early american one of making even jesus look like franz can't hold water

[Bereta_Eder]

coming to think about it the only reference to brits in ancient greece i can remember of, is one where the greek triremes sailed close to the brit isles and people there were refered to as "beasts" half man half wolf (obviously then, very hairy) that ate their own excrement and needed a couple of virgins as payment to let the greeks pass through. which the greeks gave (they had captured them before)

no idea where I read that but I remember it because it made an impression of the people in the brit isles being described as canibalistic werewolves.
admidetly kenyas maybe would have been more pleasant