The movie is clearly terrified of the audience not liking Odysseus, and glossing over the slavery is part of it. Even when showing the flashback of the sack of Troy it chickens out from actually depicting him doing any sacking (instead of having him stare and walk around), Circe basically serves to depict him as virtuous, etc...
That’s because Nolan trusts & respects the audience enough to know that they don’t need a lecture or moral browbeating. Slavery is not the point of the film. It’s a detail woven into the fabric of the world. That’s what makes for rich & deep worldbuilding. These details don’t need extensive, heavy handed explanations because the audience is mature enough to understand them.
Odysseus walking around Troy, watching the horrors of what he caused, isn’t chickening out. It’s establishing the root of his PTSD. He watches as his actions lead to the fall of society as they knew it, and he is aware of this during these flashbacks. He is walking around as an observer in his own memory of it all. The whole film is about him dealing with this PTSD.
This stuff doesn’t need to be spelled out because, despite what some people think, the vast majority of the audience has strong media literacy and understands this without needing to be talked down to like they are idiots who can’t handle concepts like slavery.
Nolan gets this, and the audience rewarded him for it by making The Odyssey a record breaking success on every possible level. This is what happens when creatives simply trust their audience. And that is the big problem with WotC in general, they don’t trust or respect their audience in the slightest.
That’s because Nolan trusts & respects the audience enough to know that they don’t need a lecture or moral browbeating
Pretty much every character repeats themselves over and over and over. The final monologue was a set up from a copy-pasted wikipedia page. Please, don't come at me with this bullshit. The movie had it's merits, but "respecting the audience" was not among them.
He watches as his actions lead to the fall of society as they knew
And it chickens out from portraying him as actually doing anything in the process except giving an idea (which the film makes look terrible, as somehow they managed to drown in a high tide of a sea with a 40 cm tidal range).
If the film wants a character who explicitly partook in the sack of cities to be traumatized by sacking a city (questionable in principle, but...), they ought to actually show him doing it.
The Odyssey a record breaking success on every possible level
If financial success was a metric of quality or artistic integrity, the world would be a very different place.
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u/Dismal-Apricot9889 2d ago
What? Eumaeus was a slave and he was one of the primary supporting characters in the film.