Post #3952120

Okay I saw The #Odyssey. It is an impressive feat of film-making. Some scenes are absolutely breathtaking and stay with you long afterward. The casting is inspired, the acting is brilliant, the cinematography is astonishing. But I get the sense that Christopher Nolan only has one kind of hero. The dark, brooding, deep intellectual yet also strong guy who carries the weight of civilization on his shoulders. Dark Knight. Father of the Bomb. It's like he was hooked by the first line of Emily Wilson's masterful new translation of The Odyssey -- "Tell me about a complicated man" -- and thought, "I like me a good complicated man." And that was that. He didn't do any other homework. So we get an Odysseus who is basically interchangeable with Batman or Oppenheimer. We get a meditation on PTSD and the crumbling of empire and morals that mirror the breaking of a man doing his duty. Oddy-heimer. We don't get the Odysseus who readers have been cheering on for 3,000 years: the trickster, the wiley, clever guy who isn't the brawniest but who always has a trick up his sleeve and keeps his wits about him in a pickle. πολύτροπον doesn't mean complicated as in brooding and emo. That first line is more often translated as the man of many devices, wiley, many-faced, hard to pin down: that kind of complicated. We don't get any jokes in the scenes with Polyphemus the Cyclops where Odysseus says his name is "nobody" (it's all clever puns and wordplay in Ancient Greek!) or Circe explaining that all men are basically pigs anyway so what's the big whoop. Intead we get monsters you can't reason with and body horror. Even killing the suitors isn't supposed to be one last act of grit but a cleverly contrived comeuppance facilitated by the gods. It is a no-fun Odyssey with intensity dialed up to 11 the whole time. Still worth seeing, but I will bet non-English speaking audiences who have their own translations of that famous first line will be truly stumped as to where this interpretation came from.