Hungry monsters, buff men, understated women: The Odyssey reviewed

The Odyssey contains a lot of very buff men with excellent upper arm definition, but the wise moviegoer would have dipped into Homer beforehand to have any hope of identifying the various characters. The need to wear full-face or three-quarter helmets in battle makes this even trickier but Matt Damon helpfully takes his helmet off whenever we need to establish where Odysseus is in the melee.

The Trojan horse is stupendous, but no clues are provided as to how it was made or delivered to the beach at Troy. Usually, it is depicted as having wheels which makes it easy to pull inside the city walls. In this case, the Trojans had to drag it inch by inch over piles of rolling logs, making it a bugger of a job for both them and the Greek soldiers being knocked about inside. 

When the Trojan war started, I expected to see Achilles, but he must have been behind one of the full-face helmets. Odysseus proved able to draw and shoot arrows faster than a speeding bullet. Many were killed without needless bloodshed, and it seemed that the destruction and collapse of the burning city was more redolent of the waste of war for Matt than the human toll. 

By contrast, the female stars were a bit lacklustre. Athena would have been easier to spot if she had worn a crown reflecting her status as a goddess rather than a tiny veil. Similarly, it was hard to know who that woman was on the beach feeding lotus flowers to Matt for seven years. Apparently, Elon Musk objected to the "integrity" of depicting Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships, as a black woman, but what would Elon know about the real world? Odysseus's wife, Penelope, was also a bit English and whiny for my taste. 

Aside from this, there were some excellent monsters. The enormous Cyclops was very scary, especially when he started snacking on Greek soldiers, and there were some silver-plated giants on another island that caused another hasty retreat to the sea. 

The narrative went back and forward over 20 years, and a blind man was helpfully provided to clue in both the characters and the audience as to what was going on at any time. 

All this would have been bigger and brighter seen in the preferred IMAX format, but I suspect the theatre walls would have crumbled if the final scene had been any louder.

Reviews are forecasting an Oscar for the actress who portrayed a witch who turned soldiers into swine, but I thought CGI was mainly responsible for the horror. 

Greeks are unhappy that no Greek actors got a role, just as Scotland was disappointed no Scots featured in Braveheart years ago.  Never mind – it’s the box office that counts.

About the reviewer

Lorraine Phillips grew up in Fairy Meadow, moved to Sydney after completing high school and worked for two years before attending Sydney University where she majored in economics. She was a graduate trainee in Neville Wran’s premier’s department and then did policy work for a range of NSW Government agencies and Parliament House. She returned to Wollongong five years ago. She wishes one of the many developers in Wollongong would build a cinema so she could see more movies without the long bus trek to Warrawong.

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