{"id":45241,"date":"2026-07-16T12:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T17:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=45241"},"modified":"2026-08-16T13:36:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T18:36:04","slug":"current-movie-reviews-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2026\/07\/16\/current-movie-reviews-80\/","title":{"rendered":"Current Movie Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Odyssey<\/strong><\/em><\/a> (2026) brings into focus a background question that occasionally bothers me: Why remake stories?<\/p>\n

My tentative answer is that it brings the story and its themes into closer contact with the society in which the version exists. For example, my faint memories of the the original story, translated into English, from years ago was a concentration on the fates of the kings involved in the sacking of Troy, the three principal kings being Odysseus, King of Ithaca, Agamemnon<\/a>, King of Mycenae, and Menelaus, King of Sparta, as well as the King of Troy, Priam, and his luckless son, Paris, who precipitated the Trojan War.<\/p>\n

Only Menelaus, husband of the stolen Helen, has a relatively calm post-war existence, although he lacks a licit male heir, which, for many in contemporary audiences, would have been considered a catastrophe. Agamemnon is murdered by his wife when he returns home, with the never-believed prophet Cassandra, daughter of King Priam, in tow; Priam, after seeing his sons Paris and Hector die in battle, dies knowing his city is doomed; the eponymous hero of story and movie is the focus of same.<\/p>\n

So how is the story changed for a 21st century American audience? Although the other three kings are present, they are in exceedingly small roles, and their fates, in earlier centuries considered moral lessons, are barely touched upon in this movie. In particular, Agamemnon, who might be considered the uber-king of the bunch, is barely touched upon, as his sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, to propitiate the Gods, is hardly mentioned, and the murder of his new slave, Cassandra, by his wife is not mentioned at all. The tragedy befalling Priam is trivialized because we only see bits and pieces of him, despite the importance of Troy to him.<\/p>\n

And King Odysseus? In the original, after adventures on the trip home, including the loss of the crew of his ships, he slaughters the suitors to his wife and resumes his throne. In this version?<\/p>\n

Who can skip a clever slaughter? But the ending is changed to make Odysseus the former King, leaving Ithaca and taking his wife Penelope away to fulfill a pledge he made to the ghosts of dead comrades. This is a nod to the current era of American hyper-individualism, wherein the importance of the preservation of the polis<\/em><\/a>, the Greek city-state, is not as important as fulfilling the individual desires. It’s a failure to recognize and fulfill the responsibility a King has to their polis, as certainly Odysseus, the cleverest of men, who now has experience with other nations, other kings, and the Gods of Olympus would be a fine and dandy King.<\/p>\n

And it’s certainly not<\/strong> true that Prince Telemachus, his hardly-old-enough-to-drink son, would make for a better King. But Odysseus is tired and even grief-stricken.<\/p>\n

How’s the rest of the film? I loved the Trojan Horse, not only for its style, but its gritty realism. The sacking of Troy is not only too long, but it’s recapitulated later, which was quite tedious. The sequence featuring the transformation of crew into pigs is touching, and the sequence with Polyphemus the Cyclops, although disappointing in that Polyphemus is deprived of dialog, certainly accelerated my breathing. I do appreciate that hyper-reality was not employed in the deaths of the Ithacans on that island.<\/p>\n

It’s certainly not a horrid movie, but it would have benefited from some clarity of thought concerning the themes in the original – and how those themes have been transmuted by societal evolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Odyssey (2026) brings into focus a background question that occasionally bothers me: Why remake stories? My tentative answer is that it brings the story and its themes into closer contact with the society in which the version exists. For example, my faint memories of the the original story, translated \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45471,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45241\/revisions\/45471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}