The Odyssey a non-spoiler review

[Barry]

I saw and enjoyed a very good movie, the Odyssey. The IMAX theaters were all booked up and I saw it at AMC Dolby theater. While the IMAX Theatres do have the widest screen, I always felt that the Dolby theaters, you still have wide , had more vivid colors in their projected image and better sound. Both the picture and sound were incredible and everything looks so real,

Of course, this is another one of my non-spoiler reviews, which is a bit difficult in that most of us know the Odyssey and I won’t get into what is put in and what is left out, although, perhaps because I saw it last week, it did remind me of the Sinbad movie and a little bit of Jason and the Argonauts.

The movie also features a little bit of the Iliad and the soldiers inside the Trojan horse. Of course., we get the expression “ beware of Greeks bearing gifts” from this episode. Actually, it really should say ‘beware of gifts bearing Greeks.’  At this point in the movie I realized the soldiers might have had the same problem,I did. Both the soldiers in the Trojan horse and on the ships they sail did not have any bathroom facilities. I thought of bathrooms a few times during the 3 1/2 hours I was at my seat. The movie is only three hours, but you get a half an hour of commercials and coming attractions. We need to teach the director the word “Intermission!”

The movie concentrates on Odysseus and his crew finding their way home after the Trojan war. At the end, Odysseus is alone and has to face the hardest obstacle of all: the New Jersey Turnpike without EZ Pass. You may think that the cyclops was tough but those toll takers are worse.

Nolan, the director of this movie and Batman did have a couple of wonderful scenes with Spider-Man meeting Catwoman. That is., Tom Holland meeting Anne Hathaway.

The casting here was intriguing. And I fully understand what he did. Simply he had three beautiful women in important parts but he needed to have Helen of Troy stand out and be different from the three. He did that by casting Lupita Nyong’o. This is actually a very small part. I don’t think she’s on the screen for five minutes.

I did have a good time and there are a few points i would like to raise, but I’ll wait till David or Scott going depth about the movie when the 4K comes out.

One serious point with no kidding. More and more I can’t stand people reviewing movies that aren’t out yet. I have heard too many reviews from people who haven’t seen this movie yet. You’re allowed to dislike it, but please see it first.

[bmoney]

Def looking forward to this one

[Barry]

I want to add something to my review, something I’m sure most people here already know. A movie is always going to be very different from the book. A movie has different pacing and a limited time structure to tell a story. And of course, movies have to be updated to make sense.

For example, James Bond in the books of the1950s smoked 60 cigarettes a day and drank half a bottle of liquor. You couldn’t do that today either in a book or on screen.

Goldfinger in the book wanted to rob Fort Knox, what would take up a half a dozen pages. In a movie that would take a half an hour. So instead of robbing Fort Knox he was going to blow it up. This worked out so well I enjoyed both the book in the movie.

I am reading criticisms of the movie, the Odyssey and people who I am sure have never read the book criticizing the movie because it’s different from a 3000 year-old story. Yes, tons of stuff has have been left out and yes, a lot of things have been modernized. But it still made a good movie.

In fact that the thing that has been most modernized is the language. Not only do they speak English with an American accent, but modern day expressions are also used.

One of the translators have been getting a great deal, publicity criticizing the movie because it left out about 500 pages of it. I don’t know what has happened where people take almost a political view on these things. And so much of the criticism is coming from people who never say that they have read the book, which is only about 750 pages. I will be totally honest and say that I read this in high school and thought I had read the whole book but now I realize we only read what was about 200 pages.

[bmoney]

Very much looking forward to this at home 

[Paul Heroy]

I've been meaning to chime in, as I saw it Tuesday after opening weekend. To be honest, I don't really feel competent to review it after a single viewing. I haven't read the source material in full, and only excerpts long ago. So that said, some impressions...

I loved parts of it, but also found it really tough to sit through. There have been 3-ish hour movies (I clocked this at 2:45 from opening scene to credit roll) that were much less demanding to sit through. This was probably intentional, as it felt like a real "odyssey" for me to sit through until the final act. It felt like every bit of the tension of Odysseus's torturous journey was conveyed. The soundtrack was a big element in conveying that with absolutely brutal efficacy, using a pervasively tense mood that almost never "resolved", only increased in intensity. 

There is no question that the film is incredibly well done on most levels. The physical parts of the movie were really visceral and convincing. I didn't quite like Damon's line delivery, and some of the dialog felt a bit casually modern, as Barry mentioned.