The Odyssey (1997)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Don't listen to the negative reviews

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Amazing series!! Too close to homer's to poem too band who don't make the same with the Iliad.

If it was not for the fact that this film felt so bad it was good, it would have been unwatchable. The film looks like it genuinely honestly tries to be something good, but misses the mark horribly. The film is full of inconsistencies. For example, Telemachus is born with an English accent (Unlike the rest of the cast)yet he grows out of this accent as he grows up. The actors don't have the slightest clue what they are doing, speaking in tones that simply don't make sense for the situation. A great example of this poor acting is when Odys mother kills herself. She walks into the Sea (This method of suicide is nowhere in the book and is physically impossible) and drowns herself. One of the servants is swinging her head back and forth repeatedly. This is an attempt to convey grief, but fails miserably.

The depiction of Greek life during the end of the Mycenaean era was accurate (as far as I've read and researched), and the costumes were exemplary. Odysseus, Anticlea, and Penelope's actors nailed their parts with nearly perfect consistence.Some parts of the movie felt a little awkward or stilted for me in regards to the delivery of the lines, such as Circe's character. Hermes was also a bit...odd. My personal image of him is that of a cheeky teenager, not the September issue for Hot Daddies Monthly, but what can you do.Much like Odysseus, I wanted the journey to just end already, and only 10% of that feeling was derived from the film's length. I was emotionally invested in his quest to return home and was overjoyed when he and Penelope finally reunited. It does succeed in breathing life into these characters and if you had to entertain your college students with a film that ties into Greek mythology, let it be this one.

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.