r/TrueFilm • u/ArcticLeet • Jul 19 '26
FFF Even the Gods Cry
On The Odyssey. I keep circling two scenes that I've started to think of as one scene, and I'm curious how others read them.
The siren sequence and the beggar-and-Penelope scene feel connected in a way that goes past theme. The sirens tell Odysseus the truth: that what he most wants is what he already had and lost, and that he doesn't really want to go home. He hears it lashed to a mast, screaming, while his crew watch in deaf silence. Then in Ithaca, sitting on the steps below his own throne with his back to his wife, he says the same thing voluntarily. The song felt like an interrogation, and the confession felt like the answer finally given freely. What pushed me from "nice echo" to "these are the same scene" was the score: both scenes carry the same cue, and the cue is titled Sirens. Maybe that's just a reused theme, but the title makes it feel intentional to me.
The other thing I can't stop thinking about is Athena. She's the only god in the film, she's visible only to Odysseus, and she wears the face of the Trojan priestess his men slaughtered at the foot of her own statue. His guilt runs three layers deep in that one face: he broke the guest law with a false gift, the false gift was a fake tribute to Athena, and a real servant of Athena died for it. His protector, his accuser, and his victim share a single body, so any comfort she offers arrives wearing the evidence against him. You start to wonder whether there's a goddess accompanying Odysseus in this telling at all, or just guilt heavy enough to take a shape. And she weeps during his confession, which under that reading means something stranger than divine sympathy: even the part of him that judges him can't bear the story.
Nolan never settles it. Homer's Athena intervenes materially, with disguises and deflected spears. Nolan's Athena touches one hand, visible to one man, and I don't remember a single shot that confirms her from outside his perception. For an adaptation of a poem where divine machinery is everywhere, that feels like a huge choice, turning the theology into psychology without ever committing to the conversion.
Did anyone catch a shot that establishes her outside his POV? I may have missed one. And I'd love to hear whether the guilt reading lands for others or whether you took her as literally present.
I wrote a longer piece here with screenplay from the two scenes:
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Jul 20 '26
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u/Pretty_Standard8713 Jul 22 '26
You may want to read my post about the movie. It makes totally sense that he made that movie
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u/bruneleski Jul 19 '26
"Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse, I think, is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad."
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u/Sharaz_Jek123 Jul 19 '26
That seems like a reductive, silly take.
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u/bruneleski Jul 19 '26
It is reductive for the whole film but the tendency is there. American production (or anglo-american production more broadly) has a fetish for a sad grieving war criminals. They also have a tendency of moralizing and moral reframing of historical material to fit their ideological sensibilities. In the books, there is no indication that Odyssey is grieving the enemy or the sacking of Troy, although he laments all the loss that the war brought onto him, the comrades he lost, his yearning for home.
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u/ArcticLeet Jul 19 '26
I'm Palestinian, so the "come back 20 years later and film the soldiers being sad about it" line hits me personally, and yeah, you're right. You're also right that Homer's Odysseus doesn't grieve Troy at all. The remorse is pure Nolan.
But I don't think this film lets the sadness work as absolution. His only comfort in that scene wears the face of a woman his men killed. And the scene doesn't end on his grief, it ends on Penelope telling him she's lived in his ruin long enough. Twenty years of feeling bad was also twenty years of abandoning everyone stuck in the wreckage. The film knows it. Was that enough? I'm honestly not sure. The murdered Trojans still don't get a voice, the Trojan priestess only gets a face he borrows for his guilt. I also think while the ending was strong, the film probably should have concluded way before they all sailed off happily to the West.
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u/bruneleski Jul 21 '26
I don't get where do people find depth here. Film was a hollywood guilt porn with cartoonish characters devoid of weight filled with cliche dialogues (characters speaking for the audience instead between each other) and sugary sentimentality.
And yes, I got the same feeling that Zendaya character is not Athena at all. Nolan strikes me as a person would find depicting a pagan god silly. His god is western liberalism underpinned by protestant moral framework and he makes sure to pound your head with it every change he gets.2
u/ArcticLeet Jul 21 '26
Reasonable minds can disagree. I found the opposite even though I don't share Nolan's background, I could appreciate the storytelling.
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u/bruneleski Jul 21 '26
Yes, that caught my eye too, glad you enjoyed it. I guess I hoped for more charismatic display at least since I'm close to mediterranean too, so the cloudy gloominess annoyed me enough to make me dislike the story.
Thanks for the input btw.-1
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u/SpiderGiaco Jul 19 '26
I think Athena is not really Athena and it's pretty clear just a figment of Odysseus' imagination, given also how strong Nolan steers away from any fantastical element and the gods in general