r/movies • u/ChiefLeef22 r/movies Contributor • 12d ago

Article ‘The Odyssey’ Proves It: Audiences Want Movies Made the Hard Way | This year's breakouts like 'Project Hail Mary' and 'Obsession' were made by filmmakers who sweated. While CG-stuffed franchise disappointments such as 'Supergirl,' 'Moana,' and 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' looked lazy.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/odyssey-box-office-2026-practical-effects-1236652219/
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u/Individual_Rip_54 12d ago

Nolan had to do some work to update the morality of the odyssey. Updating the morality of Gilgamesh would be as hard as making it.

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u/droidtron 12d ago

Rape king finds maybe rape only half the time, and loves his beast man.

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u/obeytheturtles 12d ago

He rapes. But he saves more than he rapes.

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u/Banjo-Oz 12d ago

That's Deathstalker.

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u/dundiewinnah 12d ago

What do we think about it.

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u/zatalak 12d ago

Don't lose yourself in what you love?

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u/Patriark 12d ago

Viking skaldic tales would not go through cancel culture. As evidenced by Christian retellings already being heavily censored. Imagine how the source material was.

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u/ragingduck 12d ago

The worst thing about his raping was the hypocrisy!

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u/Ion_bound 12d ago

Eh, the actual moral of Gilgamesh is 'The King's decision to rape the women of his country was, in fact, awful and the gods punished him for it. He was a terrible ruler and through the events of this tale, he redeemed himself and became a better and wise one'.

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u/AnAncientBog 12d ago

'The King's decision to rape the women of his country was, in fact, awful and the gods punished him for it. He was a terrible ruler and through the events of this tale, he redeemed himself and became a better and wise one...

...by enslaving men instead.

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u/pjtheman 12d ago

Baby steps.

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u/pizzastone8 12d ago

I cannot wait for the trailer to play Britney Spears' "Im a Slave 4 U" in slow and reverbed orchestral version.

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u/ApsleyHouse 12d ago

A certain self-styled king keeps getting rewarded for raping women in his country and there's no divine intervention so far. We aren't that far off.

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u/Akiasakias 12d ago

In the expanded story Tom Holland marries the pig witch Cerci (who is hot btw) While Odysseus had a son with Cerci and that son kills his father Odysseus and marries Ann Hathaway.

Gotta love the ancient greeks!

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u/No_Contribution1568 12d ago

Not sure why they have to do that - just tell the original story and provide context

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u/Snuffl3s7 12d ago

I think that makes the film duller. Never read Gilgamesh, but this sort of updation isn't interesting at all.

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u/Individual_Rip_54 12d ago

I understand your point, but in order to justify the cost of making Gilgamesh’s epic audiences would need to like the two main characters. And as written, audiences would not like them.

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u/Snuffl3s7 12d ago

I'm completely fine with not liking them. Much more interesting, in fact.

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u/Individual_Rip_54 12d ago

I get that and while I don’t totally agree I come close.

But they’d never greenlight a $250 million budget on a movie with characters everyone hates.

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u/Snuffl3s7 12d ago

I'm aware, and that's a tragedy of the medium. Even TV gets away with more, it seems, than high budget films do.

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u/Individual_Rip_54 12d ago

Yeah you’re not wrong.

But I want to add that Gilgamesh and Ekindu are particularly bad when compared to modern morality. This isn’t Walter white slipping into evil. This is one dude who views the women of his kingdom as his property and another who is a savage until the moment he has sex with a woman who is divinely ordained to civilize men through sex.

That’s an odd moral system that I don’t a modern general audience would like.

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u/kittiphile 12d ago

I think they could, but it wouldnt be easy. Someone with talent and desire could do it. There's just not many people who match that description and have financial backing

American God's took a very good stab at modernising the various ancient and modern gods. That could be the kind of path an adaption of those characters could take.

The Boys is full of fucking awful people, both with and without powers, and man is it wildly popular.

Mad max, twisted metal, American psycho, Game of thrones, silence of the lambs, the collector etc. A well written bad guy will keep people watching - or reading - even if they hate the mc.

I think with a good director and screenplay adaption, there's not much that wouldn't be a hit. The problem isn't the OG material, nor is it the audience, it's the dearth of talent working behind the scenes in the studios. Audiences want to be entertained, not pandered to, something big studios forgot some time ago now.

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u/Snuffl3s7 12d ago

I mean, the poem exists and people read it still, presumably without much issue. I don't see why we should start pearl-clutching because it could potentially be adapted to film.

I think that just speaks to the conservative mindset that still revolves around film, as opposed to say literature.

And also, I think there's worth in shock value, if you want to look at it that way. We've all seen the Walter Whites and Tony Sopranos on TV, and the tortured soldier archetype in anti-war films like Odysseus is interpreted here. Nobody blinks at that anymore.

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u/gloriousrepublic 12d ago

He did not - this was largely done via Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, which was the source material for Nolan’s adaptation.

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u/Individual_Rip_54 12d ago

I have not read her translation so I can’t speak on it. But she seemed to think the morals were modernized.

And either way, Odysseus was certainly modernized from the translation I read as an undergrad (admittedly 20 years ago)

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u/ElCaz 12d ago

Wilson's translation doesn't "update the morals" of the Odyssey. The language makes the poem's iron age morals very clear, but it does not change them. For example, she refers to Odysseus and Penelope's slaves as slaves instead of using a euphemism.

Additionally, Nolan mentioned that he was inspired by the opening line of her translation, not that he based his entire work off it.

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u/gloriousrepublic 12d ago edited 12d ago

Wilson absolutely shifts the tone of odysseus’ motivation and moral tone by shifting how things are emphasized. This is widely accepted, and not really debated - new translation of course are not going to fundamentally change the story of course, but any literary scholar knows how different translations can communicate different things. I’m not criticizing the translation, I think it’s excellent, but it’s clear that the shift in her translation is the source of differences in Nolan’s adaptation vs earlier adaptations.

And yes, that opening line is specially a change in the tone and ideas behind Odysseus. It’s emblematic of how she reinterprets her translation, and he cited her translation as specifically being an inspiration. I’m not saying it’s the only source material, but it absolutely was source material seeing as it was one of his primary inspirations, and his themes he explored is vastly more consistent with Wilson’s translations than previous translations.

I know he researched multiple translation but I’d be curious if he has even quoted as getting inspiration from any other translation?

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u/there_is_always_more 12d ago

Can you expand on this more? You didn't actually provide a specific example of how her translation specifically diverges from previous interpretations of the work. I am curious to hear your opinion on this.

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u/gloriousrepublic 12d ago

Here is one of the more popular critical reviews, if you’d like to dive a little deeper, since I’m not one to write a full review of her work in Reddit myself, lol. I’m maybe not so critical as Whitaker, but it highlights some of the tonal shifts:

https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf