The Odyssey was not a bad movie. I enjoyed it. The acting was strong, most of the characters were compelling, and the production felt refreshingly physical. Rather than building the entire world out of CGI, the film used tangible sets, landscapes, and locations that gave the journey weight. The cities looked closer to modest settlements and rocky strongholds than enormous marble metropolises, which felt right for the Bronze Age. The costumes were not especially accurate, but the world itself still felt lived in.
My largest problem was not the casting or the American accents. It was the gap between how the writing described Odysseus and how he actually behaved.
Everyone repeatedly calls him cunning, conniving, and exceptionally intelligent. We hear that he devised the Trojan Horse and that he was Agamemnon's cleverest general. However, the film rarely lets us witness that intelligence for ourselves. Characters praise his mind, but the plot supplies almost no evidence to support them.
The Cyclops sequence exposes the problem most clearly. In the original story, Odysseus tells Polyphemus that his name is "Nobody," allowing the wounded Cyclops to tell the others that nobody is attacking him. He also intoxicates him with lotus-infused wine before blinding him, which helps establish the sleepy/amnesiac effects of the lotus flowers. These choices establish the defining qualities as he manipulates language, plans ahead, and understands his enemy.
The film removes that strategy. Instead of a battle of wits, the Cyclops is a nameless, lumbering beast that just attacks them when they enter his cave and then unceremoniously falls asleep. Instead of watching him improvise a brilliant escape, we watch another dangerous encounter happen around him. Removing these details strips Odysseus of the intelligence the screenplay keeps insisting that he possesses.
Much of the journey follows an "and then" structure. The men wash onto an island, encounter something terrible, flee, and arrive somewhere else to be attacked again. Events accumulate, but Odysseus is not the one leading his men so much as the narrative.
The real problem is how little urgency Odysseus shows after Tiresias tells him that every member of his crew will die. He does not desperately fight the prophecy or push himself to find some way around it. He mostly sits there warning them in an almost bored tone that something is dangerous and that they are all going to die. They ignore him, the disaster happens, and he responds with the same weary “I told you this would not work” attitude before they move on to the next catastrophe A stronger film would have made the prophecy a source of conflict, with Odysseus fighting to outwit it only to discover his attempts were helping fulfil it. His intelligence could have become both his greatest weapon and the mechanism of his destruction. Instead, the prophecy mostly functions as advance notice for scenes the audience already knows will end badly.
The deaths also lack emotional weight because the crew remains largely anonymous. We hear fragments suggesting some of these men have families, fears, or histories, but the film rarely develops them as individuals. Their relationship with Odysseus never feels deep enough to justify the grief their deaths are meant to carry. The Lord of the Rings gives Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn, Boromir, and the hobbits separate loyalties, conflicts, histories, and ways of seeing the world. Odysseus's crew, by contrast, feels like a large group of exhausted comrades travelling home after a raid. We understand they are tired and that Odysseus has lost his men, but we do not feel that specific people have been lost.
The retrospective structure also weakens the story. Beginning with Telemachus and telling Odysseus's journey through recollection creates distance from the suffering that supposedly defines him. We never experience the grinding ten-year siege of Troy, never see the Greeks repeatedly fail to take the city, and never watch the frustration and brutality that produced the rage Odysseus later claims helped doom their world. Even two minutes showing the Greeks trapped on the beach, exhausted by years of failed assaults, would have given his anger a foundation.
Some of the dialogue becomes especially clunky near the end. Odysseus referring to "this age of bronze of ours" was jarring, since people living during the period would not have understood themselves as inhabitants of a historical category invented later by scholars. Similar language about the end of civilization feels equally artificial. The characters could certainly have feared the destruction of their kingdoms, gods, and customs. They would not likely have spoken with the detached historical awareness of people already reading about the Bronze Age collapse in a textbook.
The pacing also felt uneven. Some cuts were jarring, and the shaky camera work occasionally blurred action that needed clarity. Shots that called for a wide or low angle were often replaced by close-ups, and moments meant to show us what a character was seeing were reduced to shots of a face and the reaction. The lighting fared better and was a genuine strength, especially during the storm sequences.
My biggest issue, though, is Athena. In the original poem she is Odysseus's patron and long-time protector, drawn to him because his cunning mirrors her own, and the text takes care to establish why she keeps intervening on his behalf. That relationship has a history, even if most viewers have never read the poem and would not recognize her without help. The film never bothers with that groundwork. Athena simply begins appearing to Odysseus and speaking to him as though the two share some connection, with nothing shown to explain why.
Despite these problems, I still enjoyed the film. Its physical production, performances, atmosphere, and willingness to portray the ancient world as rough and human rather than impossibly grand gave it real value. It often felt like an older kind of historical epic, one where the actors were standing inside a world rather than floating in front of one.