The Odyssey: First Thoughts

Ok, so I kinda have to post about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It’s made a huge splash, it’s filling theaters, and it’s gotten people talk about a 2,500 year old poem. So I need to discuss it. I have a lot of thoughts, about different pieces of it, so this post is gonna be things I can talk about in short chunks. The Visuals The film is visually striking, with great cinematography. I loved the treatment of the Trojan Horse, and the film’s depiction of Troy is a reasonable stab at a Bronze Age Greek community. The other two communities, Ithaca and Sparta, are a bit more problematic. The Spartan palace, where Menelaus (John Bernthal) and Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) receive Telemachus (Tom Holland) and Mentor (Ryan Hurst) has absurdly high ceilings–it’s unlikely that the Mycenaean Greeks could have built a structure with a ceiling that high. The palace of Ithaca looks more plausible architecturally(apart from the cantilevered stairs) , but it’s a very dark gloomy space, when we know that…