Watched The Odyssey. It was good.

I think I mentioned that we watched The Odyssey on my birthday down in Hobart. It was good, great in fact, and I enjoyed it bigly. One of the things I most enjoyed about it was amusing myself afterwards, thinking of all the classic scholars who got their snark on over Nolan’s adaptation not measuring up to their requirements. It reminded me a lot of toxic fandom in sci-fi and comic book worlds.

It’s probably a bit unfair to single out Emily Wilson, the translator of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, translations which Christopher Nolan drew on when writing his screenplay. There are plenty of other classic scholars around who have their own issues with his film. Having watched it now, I sort of wonder what they wanted.

Well, actually, I don’t wonder; I know exactly what they wanted: their own personal version. But as anybody who’s seen one of their favorite books adapted for the screen will tell you, there are no perfect adaptations. It’s two different forms of media. To read the Odyssey closely would probably take about 20 to 30 hours, depending on how closely you read it and how fast you normally read. I suppose if Netflix ponied up a couple of hundred million dollars, you could make a 22-episode series that would be a faithful adaptation, but it would be a fucking disaster.

One of Wilson’s objections to the film was based on the lack of thirstiness among its characters. There’s a heap of violent action in both epic poems, but there’s also a heap of sexy time, and we didn’t see much, if any, of that on screen. But so what? There’s a whole bunch of stuff we didn’t see on screen, despite the fact the film ran for three hours.

I thought, given the difficulty of the source material, particularly the structural difficulty of adapting the Odyssey, which arrives in the form of a couple of dozen different books in a discontinuous narrative, Nolan did a great job. If you haven’t seen it already, do yourself a favor and check it out on the big screen. We saw it in a multiplex, and I very much enjoyed the experience, but I may go back and check it out in IMAX while I still can.