A decent cast and some tight writing make this a pretty good spectacle. Poor Odysseus (Armand Assante). He spends ten years fighting for the Greeks in the Trojan War, and it takes him another nine years to survive the return trip and reach his kingdom in Ithaca. He undergoes many adventures -- some good and some horrifying -- along the way, and meanwhile at home his wife Penelope (Greta Scacchi) is fending off dozens of suitors who believe Odysseus is dead and who want to take over his island and his wife.
Why does Odysseus have such a tough time? Because he overreached. After he figured out how to get inside the walls of Troy (the Trojan Horse) he bragged aloud that he could do anything he wanted without the help of the gods. Poseidon (who later became the Roman Neptune) heard him and was royally browned off, so he regularly interfered with the sea voyage of Odysseus and his men. PO'ing the gods was one of three cardinal sins for the Greeks, called hubris. A second sin was pleonexis, being overly materialistic. I forget the third sin. I think it may have had to do with pronouncing "nuclear" as "nukyoolar."
This version has a couple of good things going for it. In the DVD commentary, Assante says that the writers managed to trim it down to an adventure story, leaving out the philosophizing. But I don't remember much philosophizing in the original. If there's a message in Homer's tale it's that the dice of the gods are loaded. At least this version HAS gods in it, while other films built around The Iliad and The Oddysey have tended to eliminate them entirely and turn the sources into sword and sandal epics full of muscle men. Furthermore, these gods aren't remote, distant, humorless giants. They're playful, whimsical and sometimes spiteful, like the originals.
Some episodes are deleted, like Odysseus' affair with the teen-age Nausicaa. And we don't get to see Odysseus recognized by his old dog, Argos, when he finally returns in disguise to Ithaca. I don't know why it was left out. Everybody likes dogs except people who like cats. The dialog is stylized but rendered in prose, which is okay. "Iambic pentameter helps you remember the lines." (I think that sentence is in iambic pentameter, if I counted correctly.) Homer just put that into the story to make it easier to remember. Rhymes and metric lines are memory pegs. ("Thirty days hath September....") Like "The Iliad", "The Odyssey" was an oral tradition, to be recited from memory before an audience. If you left out "wine-dark" before sea, you knew you'd messed up something in your recitation. The photography and location shooting are achingly gorgeous.
The cast is full of well-known names, some of whom do better than others. Assante is a believable Odysseus. He's given some time to mourn the loss of his men, as is proper, and is allowed to weep convincingly. Of the rest, most are pretty good. Except, I must say that Vanessa Williams, a real stunner, is poorly wardrobed (when she's wearing anything) and sounds like an amateur actress compared to the others. Eric Roberts is Eurymachus, the chief suitor, and adds some touches to the role as a real scuzzbag.
The special effects beat those in any other version that I'm aware of. Scylla, the multiple-headed monster who snatches men off ships and eats them, is truly spooky, looking like a highly sentient and directional Venus fly trap. Ugh. The cyclops is no better. He traps the Greeks in his cave and after eating one or two, he gets drunk until, as Homer put it in one translation, he falls asleep "dribbling liquor and bits of men." The "no-man" ruse is retained.
You know something? This is a pretty good story for a whole family. The kids will learn something about ancient Greece and they'll be entertained by the (considerable) violence. A generation ago, there was a great push to discard the works of "dead, white European males" from high school and college curricula in favor of multi-culturalism. By "multi-culturalism" I didn't get the impression that anyone wanted to read the Baghavad Gita or the Analects of Confucius, just mostly contemporary works critical of Euroamerican culture. But here's a literary icon of that culture -- and it couldn't be more "other" if it tried.
Why does Odysseus have such a tough time? Because he overreached. After he figured out how to get inside the walls of Troy (the Trojan Horse) he bragged aloud that he could do anything he wanted without the help of the gods. Poseidon (who later became the Roman Neptune) heard him and was royally browned off, so he regularly interfered with the sea voyage of Odysseus and his men. PO'ing the gods was one of three cardinal sins for the Greeks, called hubris. A second sin was pleonexis, being overly materialistic. I forget the third sin. I think it may have had to do with pronouncing "nuclear" as "nukyoolar."
This version has a couple of good things going for it. In the DVD commentary, Assante says that the writers managed to trim it down to an adventure story, leaving out the philosophizing. But I don't remember much philosophizing in the original. If there's a message in Homer's tale it's that the dice of the gods are loaded. At least this version HAS gods in it, while other films built around The Iliad and The Oddysey have tended to eliminate them entirely and turn the sources into sword and sandal epics full of muscle men. Furthermore, these gods aren't remote, distant, humorless giants. They're playful, whimsical and sometimes spiteful, like the originals.
Some episodes are deleted, like Odysseus' affair with the teen-age Nausicaa. And we don't get to see Odysseus recognized by his old dog, Argos, when he finally returns in disguise to Ithaca. I don't know why it was left out. Everybody likes dogs except people who like cats. The dialog is stylized but rendered in prose, which is okay. "Iambic pentameter helps you remember the lines." (I think that sentence is in iambic pentameter, if I counted correctly.) Homer just put that into the story to make it easier to remember. Rhymes and metric lines are memory pegs. ("Thirty days hath September....") Like "The Iliad", "The Odyssey" was an oral tradition, to be recited from memory before an audience. If you left out "wine-dark" before sea, you knew you'd messed up something in your recitation. The photography and location shooting are achingly gorgeous.
The cast is full of well-known names, some of whom do better than others. Assante is a believable Odysseus. He's given some time to mourn the loss of his men, as is proper, and is allowed to weep convincingly. Of the rest, most are pretty good. Except, I must say that Vanessa Williams, a real stunner, is poorly wardrobed (when she's wearing anything) and sounds like an amateur actress compared to the others. Eric Roberts is Eurymachus, the chief suitor, and adds some touches to the role as a real scuzzbag.
The special effects beat those in any other version that I'm aware of. Scylla, the multiple-headed monster who snatches men off ships and eats them, is truly spooky, looking like a highly sentient and directional Venus fly trap. Ugh. The cyclops is no better. He traps the Greeks in his cave and after eating one or two, he gets drunk until, as Homer put it in one translation, he falls asleep "dribbling liquor and bits of men." The "no-man" ruse is retained.
You know something? This is a pretty good story for a whole family. The kids will learn something about ancient Greece and they'll be entertained by the (considerable) violence. A generation ago, there was a great push to discard the works of "dead, white European males" from high school and college curricula in favor of multi-culturalism. By "multi-culturalism" I didn't get the impression that anyone wanted to read the Baghavad Gita or the Analects of Confucius, just mostly contemporary works critical of Euroamerican culture. But here's a literary icon of that culture -- and it couldn't be more "other" if it tried.