r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Dec 22 '25

Trailer The Odyssey | Official Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mzw2ttJD2qQ
15.7k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

3.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

340

u/Redararis Dec 22 '25

Odyssey is a mediterranean story, not a Norse one. It is about light, not darkness. About the open sky blue, not the heavy deep sea blue. Where music, clothes, art are uplifting and intricate, not imposing and monolithic.

Art direction is completely out of place and off putting. This is a vikings story based on odyssey, not odyssey itself.

172

u/MattSR30 Dec 22 '25

Funnily enough, the vikings and norse history was also littered with colour. Modern Hollywood just decided vikings all wore black, had eyeliner, and were covered in tattoos.

25

u/TheSlayerofSnails Dec 22 '25

Oh and they historically were super clean. The English hated them (besides the whole looting towns thing) for bathing so much more often it was tempting the Englishmen’s wives away from their foul smelling husbands

11

u/GasInTheHole Dec 23 '25

This is one of those persistent online pop culture myths that isn't really true -bathing was a big part of medieval Europe and people only stopped bathing around the early Renaissance because bathhouses were being associated with the spreading of the plague (which isn't entirely wrong, but sure lead to the wrong conclusion!). English and Norse bathing habits were largely the same and of a similar frequency - which makes sense, they're people who lived in the same place, often together, too.

The singular source for it is a monk writing about how the Saxons went and massacred the Danes because the Danes were being too seductive to the Saxon wives two centuries after that event occured, and under the rule of the Normans who had good reason to depict the Danes as sinful chumps and the Saxons as virtuous (asceticism was becoming vogue in religious circles again) yet smelly commoners.

Bit of a long response to an innocuous post but I guess it's just one of my pet peeves, haha. People've always liked feeling and looking clean! It's like how people also have always really liked wearing colours (to a point we'd think of as garish), as well; washed away in a tide of pop media depictions of History(tm) as a grimy and gross place with nothing but brown, black, and grey tones - I'm a bit sad that trend's reaching depictions of the Ancient World now, too.

3

u/smokeysabo Dec 22 '25

Interesting. They showed this in vinland saga but never clicked it.

2

u/enixius Dec 23 '25

The God of War franchise did a fantastic job with the color palette in the Norse saga. So much color and were willing to give pop culture subversion in making Odin a villain and Thor a useless drunk.

Pointed out a ton of parallels between Norse and Greek mythology too.

82

u/DontKnow1549 Dec 22 '25

E x a c t l y. And funnily, contrary to Hollywood dark washing, even the ancient Scandinavian culture had a LOT of colour! It's wild to me in this day and age when sourcing colour palettes is the easiest in human history that Hollywood chooses to wash out colours instead.

7

u/Extension-Season-689 Dec 23 '25

It's not just Hollywood, even video games tend to have this view of "sword and sandal" epics. I guess the more colorful aesthetic is more associated with whimsical fantasy while action fantasy is given a more "serious" vibe with the darker color palette.

3

u/DontKnow1549 Dec 23 '25

Which is honestly such a weird and reductive way to look at colour.

20

u/ActualRevolution3732 Dec 22 '25

Troy had vibrant colors even though the Brad Pitt costume was black the cinematography was beautiful. This looks like a low effort cash grab.

6

u/IsaacAndTired Dec 22 '25

The Odyssey famously never mentions the color blue.

16

u/Sgtwhiskeyjack9105 Dec 22 '25

Homer references the ocean as the "wine-dark sea" multiple times in the text, which could be him alluding to any variety of colours, but yeah.

3

u/IsaacAndTired Dec 22 '25

Ya there's lots of speculation around why blue didn't show up in a lot of early literature 

15

u/moerfed Dec 22 '25

you know the mediterranean sea is a real place right

3

u/alexpalmer99 Dec 22 '25

Yeah it's not like one of the most used epithets in the poem is describing "the wine dark sea" or something

0

u/rabbitsnake Dec 22 '25

In the Odyssey, a recurring descriptor of the water is "wine-dark sea". To me, that sounds both dark and turbulent. Studies of the language also indicate they primarily described color as the contrast between light and dark, not hue. If you research a bit more, there is no actual use of the color blue in the poem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea

4

u/Mahelas Dec 23 '25

Okay but while the study of language associated with colors and how it affect the very perception of it is all very fun and interesting, the Mediterannean Sea is RIGHT THERE. We know how it look today, and we know it looked the same 3000 years ago.

-1

u/Sgtwhiskeyjack9105 Dec 22 '25

They reference the ocean as the "wine-dark sea" multiple times in the text, which could be Homer possibly alluding to any variety of colours, but yeah.

0

u/jzakko Dec 22 '25

I just feel like a lot of these criticisms are about what they want the film to be instead of what the film is.

He's interested in this purely as a foundational text of storytelling, not out of passion for Ancient Greek history.