The Odyssey - Hollywood Theater

The Odyssey | Official Trailer
Universal Pictures

I give it three stars. The first hour was drivel, people whining about life. The dialog was crap.

After that, things picked up. Odysseus and his crew have a series of unfortunate encounters with a succession of vicious beasts and people. At every encounter Odysseus loses some men.

The wooden horse that the Greeks built was very impressive, but leaving it on the beach doesn't seem like a good idea. Seems more likely that the Trojans would just burn in in place. The scene with dozen or two of men packed inside this horse for some number of days was well done. But not too well done, we don't want to hear about all the shit accumulating in the bottom of the horse. Couldn't the Trojans have smelt it?

The cyclops was impressively grotesque. Circe was very talented and very nasty.

I don't ever recall hearing about ten foot tall armored soldiers in The Odyssey. Did the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica wander onto the wrong set?

There was one scene where something big was reaching down from somewhere above the ship and grabbing men from the boat. It eventually retreated into a cave high in a cliff overlooking the water. We never had a clear view of what it was.

Scylla and Charybdis were mythical sea monsters noted by Homer; Greek mythology sited them on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria, on the Italian mainland.

The scene with the whirlpool was weak. 

The scene at the end where Odysseus takes on the courtyard full of courtiers looked like every action movie I've ever scene. Is he really going to kill 200 men all by his lonesome?

Notes:

• Agamemnon murdered by Clytemnestra, his wife and Helen of Troy's half-sister.
• Homer never mentioned the "Sea Peoples" in the Odyssey.
• Homer composed the Illiad (part 1 of this saga) and the Odyssey (part 2) around the late eighth or early seventh century BC.
• Ulysses is the Latin version of Odysseus.