The Odyssey sucked

The writing of the Odyssey was bad. I can accept the American accents and a crew of “Greeks, from Ithaca" made up of Welsh, Indian, Nigerian, and Korean descent. These are hurdles to overcome when becoming immersed in an ancient Greek world but if the writing was compelling enough, these aspects would have faded to the background in service of the wider story. But the writing did not carry the movie, and by the end I was getting so exasperated with how the characters spoke that I was fidgeting in my seat.

My main issue was how banal and dumb I felt the dialog was. Christopher Nolan stated he wrote the screenplay to get to the emotional core of the story, using “language that has emotional not intellectual meaning to people”: an admirable goal. However, the flatness of the language made the experience feel so constructed, so directly intended for an audience’s consumption. Nothing about it felt like people talking to each other and inhabiting a real world. 

I was reminded of Ursula Le Guin’s essay on writing dialog for fantasy stories From Elfland to Poughkeepsie. She writes about Elfland (the fantasy realm) as a “vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion,” and laments that some writers of fantasy are “building six lane highways and trailer parks with drive-in movies, so that the tourists can feel at home just as if they were back in Poughkeepsie”. I feel that’s exactly what was done to the Odyssey. By making the language more “accessible”, Nolan insulated us completely from an contact with Elfland, and any profound truths about human nature that it could have provided us.

Nothing about this dialog makes me feels like the words of heroes in epic an myth:

[Odysseus] Ten years on this fucking beach.

[Odysseus] Let’s go home. Remember those we leave here.

[Eurylochus] Do we have enough provisions?

[Odysseus] We’ve taken enough from Troy. An extra stop or two won’t slow us down.

Is this prose simple? Sure! But the Odyssey wasn’t constructed of dense complex language that needed to be simplified for us dumb rubes. In fact, Le Guin directly mentions Homeric epics in the same essay, saying “Most epics are in straightforward language, whether prose or verse […] A plan language is the noblest of all.”

But she goes on to say that plain, clear English is the most difficult to write, and the language she is deriding is “fake plainness" that is “Not really simple but flat. Not really clear, but inexact.” That’s exactly what I heard in the film, and by the end it was extremely grating to my ears. But how the characters spoke wasn’t my only issue.

The Odyssey a fantastic story, with Gods that walk the earth, magical creatures, and the living speaking with the dead. However, the 2026 version seems embarrassed to be a fantasy movie. It retains fantasy elements, just tries as much as possible to make them banal. This is clear from the start of the movie, which includes the written caption, “A time of apparent magic”. Even though there is still a cyclops, a witch who transforms men to pigs, and a six-headed monster that appear in the film, plenty of the fantastic elements were stripped away or psychologized.. The god Athena becomes a hallucination of Odysseus’s. Odysseus never physically transforms into a decrepit beggar, just puts on a costume. The siren song does not promise infinite knowledge, it just reminds Odysseus of his regrets and broken promises.

Le Guin writes:

Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.

The 2026 film is not poetic, not mystic, and there’s nothing abnormal about its psychology. Flattening speech and psychologizing the magic both function to undercut the beauty and divinity of the tale. And why? So we could better relate to these characters? Why make the heroes more like the audience? I thought the whole point of fiction was to make the audience more like the heroes.