The bottom line is that this is a modern story of little interest except that it misleads the viewers into thinking it is Homer’s Odyssey and hoodwinking them into thinking that Homer’s wit and language will appear. The film relies entirely on the Homer brand to mask a very weak narrative structure. The script is of little merit, the plot is laboured, the acting is mediocre and far too many actors are there for the colour of their skins and can hardly do justice to their named characters let alone add value to the movie.
By stripping away the literal gods, the monsters, and the clever wit of Homer, the screenplay is reduced to a bleak, ponderous character narration of a PTSD veteran wandering in the wilderness trying to get home. Instead of a grand, rip-roaring adventure, we get attempted psychological depth which fails and gives a plot which is surprisingly small, mean, repetitive, and thin.
It is more like a cheap, mythological Hindi melodrama made for Indian TV. but it does not have any trace of the usual redeeming quality of bad music. There is no grand mythological scale to compensate for the characters’ constant, high-pitched, whining pretence of emotional suffering or the heavy focus on family betrayal. Penelope’s vocal anger, and Telemachus’s resentment is less that of an ancient epic and more like a drawn-out family soap opera. The kind aired in the afternoons. Even a cheap, Hindi television epic would at least have its bad music, its pacing and the melodrama to fall back upon. With no sound cultural conventions to fall back upon the film falls into a tonal dead zone. It is much too bleak to be entertaining and much too silly (simple silly) for its aspirations as a deep psychological thriller.
The use of black and coloured actors adds nothing of any value. They certainly do not help in improving the connection to the Homer brand that the film is trying to appropriate. Neither Helen of Troy or Clytemnestra were credible as being Homeric. To have a deluded girl pretending to be a boy actually act as a boy is of very little relevance. The casting is clearly done for the sake of the casting – and whatever political brownie points that brings – but the casting neither adds value to the roles, the Homeric connection or to The Odyssey plot. Cosmetic casting.
A lot of noise and publicity just to try and leverage the Homer brand, to jump onto a woke train (if there is one), and to capture viewers. But really of very little value in its own right. Not an epic, not a block-buster, not an adventure. It has nothing really to do with Homer or to The Odyssey. If Homer had been alive he would have sued, not so much for copyright perhaps, but more for slander and bringing the Homer name into disrepute!
The k2p blog 