I am reading my oldest son the book Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. The book is about the modern world intersecting with the still active Greek Gods.
During one passage, when I was explaining an element of Greek Myth, I realized that the Gods are typically the secondary characters in stories, but rarely the stars; excluding Demigods like Perseus or Hercules. I’m talking full-on GODS!
Two reasons for this came to mind: (1) Most of the stories are adaptations from classic texts which didn’t feature the Gods as main characters, but rather as usually unseen elemental forces. (2) When it came to film, it is cheaper to make a movie about a guy with sword and sandals rather than one who controls the Oceans and Storms.
With big budget CGI/FX all the rage, I think it would be awesome for some ambitious film maker to tackle the Greek Gods head on. I think an incredible story would be the battle between Zeus et. al. versus his father, Cronus. To my knowledge, this has never been made a film, yet would be incredible!
Someone described the upcoming Percy Jackson film as Sky High meets Clash of the Titans. I think this film would be X-Men meets Clash of the Titans!
What else is Hollywood missing now that CGI and SFX have turned a big corner and the global market wants tent pole films? What would you like to see?
Hellenistic (ancient Greek) tradition was humanist. They believed in & worshiped gods & goddesses, but of chief interest to them were human beings and human achievements. This is what distinguished the Hellenes from other ancient cultures such as the Egyptians or Mesopotamians, and why they are considered the originators of ‘modern thought.’
Hellenistic mythology is primarily concerned with glorifying mankind and his accomplishments, rather than divinities. Their legends reflect the inventive nature demonstrated by men who rise above their humble beginnings; nothing was greater than that. This is even reflected in the very human character traits they give to the gods - Zeus is a lothario, Hera is perpetually jealous & spiteful, Aphrodite is vain, Ares is a bully, etc. They even made their divinities seem ‘human.’
From a practical storytelling perspective, it is simply more dramatic to tell the story of a human being struggling to overcome adversity than a god. While not omnipotent, the gods were immortal, ageless, invulnerable & able to shape the elements of the world to their will. It’s hard to wring suspense out of a story of a being who can’t be killed, has all eternity to achieve his or her goals, and is assured of getting his/her way in the end. A human being must struggle, is in danger of being killed, and must use his wiles to accomplish quests. That compels a reader (or listener in ancient times) to read (hear) how the story ends.
My daughter MilliCal was asking about this just last night – and why they needed to change the stories so much.
The truth is that
1.) The myths were in one medium – usually songs/poems, but also pottery or wall paintings, or (I suspect) spoken word, and much later in written word forms, and movies are – well – movies. The medium powerfully affects the telling of the story – how it’s told, what emphases are given, how much time is spent on what, how long speeches are (or even if they’re given). This is why Alan Moore disowned the watchmen movie – he felt there was no way a movie could do justice to a multivolume graphic novel. Heck, I think he wrote it with the idea of doing something that couldn’t be done in a movie. So any adaptation is going to change the story.
2.) There is no one version of the myth. Even only counting the time between the Golden Age and the time of Roman Domination of Greece you have over half a millenium of time during which the myths could change and develop. And the myths actually had a lot more time than that. So Ovid’s version of Perseus is seriously different from that of Pherekydes about 500 years earlier.
3.) With regard to both of these, when Beverly Cross wrote the screenplay for Clash of the Titans, he took elements from many Classical sources, but vrewrote the plot to fit the requirements and tempo of a modern 2 hour movie. “I needed to give Perseus a reason to go hunting for the Gorgon” (I semiquote him from an interview), so he has Andromeda being designated as a sacrifice to the Sea Monster (renamed Kraken) first, instead of having Perseus stumble upon her chained to a rock.
4.) The original version, even as recorded by Apollodorus, is a mish-mash that seems to be cobbled together from variant versions, retaining all of their features, even when some are pretty clearly different versions of the same event. If you didn’t eliminate a lot of this undergrowth, the stories would be too redundant and complex,.
5.) We actually don’t have nice, clean versions of many of these stories – we know them from allusions elsewhere. The longer ones that we have single connected version of have, in fact, been filmed – The Iliad, Odyssey, the Argonautica (Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece) – some of them several times.
6.) I think there is a potential market to tell some of the lesser-known stories, and/or those without a single poetic long version, as has been done with Theseus and the Minotaur. You could tell the story of the inventor Daedalus, or Cadmus and the Founding of Thebes, or Pelops and the Initiation of the Olympic Games. Or you could do a bunch of the Metamorphoses tales bundled together, as Ovid did – Arachne and Athena, and Glaucus and Scylla, , and so on. But a lot of these are kind of downers.
There are lots of Asian movies/TV series about gods and other mythic beings. I think some of those can do with being redone for Western audiences, like the Ramayana (a wicked-popular TV series made of this, BTW) or Journey to the West. I mean, Monkey was a popular series even as a dub, one with more modern sensibilities (in a Hercules/Xena mould) would rock!
When I was a kid, I saw a Japanese animated movie dubbed into English as Alakazam the Great. It was released in 1960, predating the US realease of things like Astro-Boy. It had Frankie Avalon singing the lead part (!!)
It wasn’t until years later that I read the story of Journey to the West and realized that I’d already heard the story. The film was made under the title Saiyu-ki, and is available on DVD under that title:
Don’t recall a Merlin in the movie, and neither Wiki nor IMDb gives a voice credit for the part. I’m suspecting that it’s simply recounted in a flashback or a voice-over, and that whoever wrote the English script simply chose the name “Merlin” because it was the nbame of a magician that was well-known. Not a mash-up of mythology (the film was made in Japan, after all), but a poorly-chosen translation of a name.
OTOH, there are lots of Norse myths where the Aesir are rather more vulnerable/limited than Greek gods – they’re more like demigods, really – which could make for a good filmed story.
On the subject of the classical pantheon and movies to be made: has anyone read “Gods Behaving Badly” by Marie Phillips? I thought it would make an enjoyable movie–perhaps in the mode of “Death at a Funeral”, with a British ensemble cast.
Call of Cthulhu. Basically anything by H.P. Lovecraft that isn’t done in a hokey, 80’s Herbert West: The Re-Animator style (even though I enjoyed that movie, the story was a lot more dramatic and much cooler).
I swear, there have been many times while watching movie previews in the theatre, that I’m positive the preview of [upcoming horror movie] will finally be a Lovecraft story, treated seriously and with cool special effects and everyman hero. But it never happens. I thought that Whiteout movie last year was going to be At the Mountains of Madness during the first few seconds. Or that Cloverfield was going to be something on Cthulhu. Many more times than I can remember, the first few seconds of a preview for a horror movie have gotten my hopes up, then dupe me into some idiotic, ho-hum vampire movie.