Trailer The Odyssey full trailer

[MGibster]

I've heard some criticism that the American accents are a bit jarring--especially when English actors like Pattinson and Holland are affecting American accents to play Greek characters. I've also seen some folks who don't like the use of language like "dad" as feeling too modern. Not sure that bothers me particularly though.

I remember watching a British produced movie set during WWII and finding it jarring the Brownshirts sounded like soccer hooligans. It then hit me how odd it was I didn't find it jarring when the SS characters had posh British accents. I just expect so many actors in movies set in the past to sound British for some reason. Meh, I can live with American accents.

A full trailer for Nolan's The Odyssey! We see monsters! It's definitely clear that they're fully leaning into the fantasy elements, which I'm glad to see.

I'm especially glad for this. When you remove the gods and other fantastical elements from the story you cheapen it in my opinion.

 

[Sacrosanct]

There have been a bunch of movies about Odysseus of varying adaptations of the Odyssey. What I'd like to see is a movie adaptation of Madeline Miller's Circe.

 

[Zaukrie]

I mean, I didn't get the accent thing. You want Greek accents?

In any event, what a cast. Just that part had to cost a fortune.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think the criticism isn’t actors using their own accents. I think there should be a lot more actors allowed to use their own accents. It’s British actors putting on American accents to play Greeks. It’s a conscious choice to sound American, because that’s not their natural accent.

I think everyone having the same accent is probably best. Lord knows we've had some painful attempts by American actors trying to match British accents when they were all playing someone who wouldn't have either accent.

I think it's fine, although it's certainly not the norm for Anglophone period pieces to have American accents. (Thanks, BBC historical pieces, for creating a weird expectation!) But since they're playing ancient/mythological Greeks, I'm fine with the choice.

 

[Kobold Stew]

My big question will be if they get the bow scene right. That seems to be something that, rather strangely, never seems to make sense. The easiest way to interpret it would be that Odysseus strings the bow and then shoots an arrow through the haft holes of axe heads, that are stuck blade down into a board or something. I keep seeing stuff like shooting through axe heads that have holes in the blade, through axe HANDLES, and other strange stuff. TSG Entertainment's opening logo, for example.

There are many scholarly interpretations of the scene, and there is no agreed "right" way to do the axes. Different answers have been differently persuasive over the past 8 decades or so, and there are articles form the 1950s of classicists trying out their theories in their university corridors.

Homer doesn't explain it in detail, and each reader/listener's imagination will produce different things.

I agree that haft holes are a plausible explanation, but for that to work, you need (a) a split-level dining hall (so the axe heads can be positioned at a height for someone to hold a bow and shoot [or some other way, left unspoken, for the axeheads to be positioned 3-5 feet above where the archer is standing] for the and (b) no knowledge of how gravity works.

The Greeks had (b), but it's nowhere clear (a) is intended. There's actually a lot of description of the dining hall. Odysseus does sit to string his bow (the suitors do not), and so if he fires from that position it can be a low-split, but again all this has to be inferred. The shot never occurred, and it can't occur. But it is a way of marking Od. as a hero (and Telemachus too, incidentally -- it's explicit that Telemachus would have strung the bow if Od. had not waved him off).

The "trick" of stringing the bow is also relevant. One scholarly explanation is that the bow is presented as a technological innovation, a recurve bow that the suitors are trying to string backwards. That doesn't quite work in the story (it's an ancestral bow from Ithaca, not something Od. has brought home with him from Troy), but for the wily Odysseus to have a technological answer is in character with the rest of his character resentation.

I hope the bow scene is EXCITING. For me, that's what's goign to be truest to the poem.

 

[Kobold Stew]

One detail that hasn't been mentioned is the raft in the sea: I like that we will get these shots, Od alone at sea, with Poseidon/the ocean holding him back. That's how Odysseus first appears in the Odyssey (book 5, after Telemachus has been told all sorts of stories about his dad, and we have all these second-hand accounts, before we see him, looking out to sea from Circe's isle and finally being allowed to return).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Homer doesn't explain it in detail, and each reader/listener's imagination will produce different things.

Homer definitely needed an editor.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

One detail that hasn't been mentioned is the raft in the sea: I like that we will get these shots, Od alone at sea, with Poseidon/the ocean holding him back. That's how Odysseus first appears in the Odyssey (book 5, after Telemachus has been told all sorts of stories about his dad, and we have all these second-hand accounts, before we see him, looking out to sea from Circe's isle and finally being allowed to return).

Nolan knows how to make the sea scary. It's one of the things I was, improbably, most impressed by in Interstellar.

I love the ocean, but it will 100% kill you in multiple ways.

 

[Clint_L]

Yeah, that trailer didn't do it for me. Though the anachronistic knights bothered me more than the American accents.

 

[Dioltach]

Nice to see a toppleless tower, as per Terry Pratchett.