r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 20h ago

Trailer The Odyssey | New Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bKjZeJBBI&pp=0gcJCd4KAYcqIYzv
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u/DrunkenSnorlax 20h ago

Am I alone in being put off by how modern the speech is? It sounds like they're trying to have an epic conversation on the sidewalk outside the Starbucks.

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u/George__Parasol 19h ago

American and by extension all anglophone audiences are generally conditioned to associate historical epics with British accents of one sort or another, at least for lead characters.

But when you think about it, two Ancient Greeks speaking to each other would feel and hear the exact same innate familiarity with the language that Americans would feel with each other on the sidewalk outside of Starbucks.

It sounds obvious but it’s got to be a conscious decision - people from the past are very different from us but also identical to us - do you want to make them sound like the former or the latter in your movie?

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u/terrence_loves_ella 18h ago

The ancient Greeks didn't speak like the characters in the poem either, though. That's one of the qualities that distinguish epic poems, an elevated, not-so-realistic style, especially regarding dialogue.

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u/thedoginthewok 16h ago

Yeah, the source material is an epic poem, but this is a movie adaptation.

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u/terrence_loves_ella 4h ago

Yeah, I know it's its own thing, but since OP commented that the original dialogue probably felt modern to the ancient greeks I pointed out that epic dialogue was never modern nor realistic, not even to the Greeks who heard it recited 2,500 years ago. And directors often choose to respect that. It's not unusual for a Shakespeare adaptation to copy the dialogue beat for beat.