I have always heard it pronounced “SIR-see” like they did in the movie. It’s possible this isn’t how the Greeks did it originally but it’s the only way I ever heard that character’s name said.
I hope this isn’t a spoiler, but the film is in (American) English; not Greek.
It’s one of those things where we’ve said it wrong for so long that the incorrect pronunciation is now normalized. It is indeed Keer-keh.
The thing I thought was a little off is that Iphigenia was a young woman when they sacrificed her, not a small child. They told her she was going to be married to Achilles and she found out the horrible truth when she arrived for her “wedding”. But making her a little girl does make Agamemnon even more despicable.
I don’t think scaling despicability by the age of your victim is a meaningful metric.
Ok, that is literally her, but go off I guess.
You might want to hold onto your hat, because Greek people don’t pronounce the name of their capital city as “Athens”.
Oh, I’m well aware. I also know that the pronounciation used today is not what would have been used the the classical era. Would have been ah-THAYN-ai back then.
I saw it a normal mulitplex theatre (though on their biggest screen). The nearest IMAX is a hour away, and is the lowest IMAX type. It has been stinking hot lately and wanted to get out of the house.
I liked it quite a bit, but not quite “amazeballs” The cyclops and Circe were well done, but Scylla was more land based than I imagined (still cool).
Brian
Emily Wilson, translator of the most recent version of the Odyssey which Nolan cited as his inspiration, has her review here. Summary, she’s not a fan. The nicest thing she had to say was “My teenagers had a good time.” Other than that, she thinks Nolan missed pretty much everything the Odyssey was about.
I’ve seen some good analysis of here review and will crawl through my browser history in a it to see if I can find a link. But my takeaway is that she wrote a really mean-spirited, snarky review that buried whatever legitimate commentary she had in a blizzard of bad takes.
- the food looked gross
- there weren’t any sex scenes
- Nolan changed elements of the story (rich, given that the primary complaint against her excellent translation of the Odyssey is that she changed elements of the story)
- She called Himesh Patel black (which he isn’t) and then derided the casting for putting black people in secondary roles.
- She really failed to understand that Nolan was telling us a story about society as it stands today.
- It was loud
My wife and I were discussing it the other day. Our conclusion was that she is no doubt a very intelligent woman and an excellent scholar of Homer’s work in a literary and historical sense but not much of a film critic.
I can’t imagine anyone in the field of literature ever saying “the movie was better than the book.”
There are some valid criticisms, like perhaps Nolan focused on Odysseus’ sense of guilt when that really wasn’t part of the original work in the same way, because that’s thematically relevant and a much bigger artistic choice to change the impact of the story.
But a lot of adaptation criticisms are just “hey, you took a work that takes 50 hours to read and compressed it into 3 hours and left some stuff out!” - yeah, well, no shit, that’s what adaptation is. Adapting is its own art, and not every format is going to preserve every part of the original. And can’t.
I quit reading the review about halfway through because I got sick of her whining that not everyone interprets the poem her way. She needs to take the advice of that great philosophical poem, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song, “just repeat to yourself ‘it’s just a [film], I should really just relax.’”
How is that a valid criticism? Nolan told the story he wanted to tell.
I’m not usually into the whole “death of the author” thing, but when the author has been dead for 2800 years and his work is one of the foundations of Western civilization, you can use his stories to make any point you want.
Valid criticism doesn’t necessarily mean that Nolan was wrong, just that it’s substantive and it’s worth pointing out that the original story didn’t focus on that as a theme. I was comparing that to minutia like “they didn’t include this or that scene” since those are necessary and routine changes when adapting a work, whereas changing the themes is a more substantial change to the underlying work.
Based on your takeaway, I read her review with trepidation.
And was surprised to find that I agreed with her on nearly every point she made.
Not only that, I thought it was one of the best reviews (and essays) I have ever read. It was insightful, very well-written, and funny. (At one point, she writes: “At the end of the film, a character sets out to ‘sail beyond the sunset’ and I almost expected everyone to break into Elvish.” 
)
Her actual quote was: “Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.”
Do you think she was also calling Zendaya Black?
I completely disagree. In her review, she managed to tie in Nolan’s filmography from his first feature film back in 1998 (Following), to Inception, and even references Batman and Robin. She compares the film to the Lord of the Rings films, and Game of Thrones.
I was actually trying to put my own thoughts into words after seeing the film last night. As I posted in the other threat, it was visually stunning. But that was about it.
Everything in the movie seemed like a static set piece. We see the Cyclops. But he just shows up and starts munching on Greeks. That’s it. There is no banter and no conversation. He supposedly spoke, but his words were incomprehensible to me. (Although this did lead to one of the best lines in the movie when one of Odysseus’s men wonders if they can reason with it, and Damon’s Odysseus grimly replies, “I think we’re past that”. )
The giants show up in their shiny plate mail, and start walloping Greeks. Why? Who knows?
They maneuver past Scylla and Charybdis, and it seemed like an afterthought.
And why is Calypso keeping Odysseus drugged up and under her spell? Just to hang out? Because nothing else seems to be happening, least of all sex, as Emily Wilson and others have pointed out.
I dunno. I really wanted to like this movie. And again, it was visually stunning. But it was ultimately unsatisfying. Just like the gross food portrayed in the film.
I paid close attention to this last night. There are definitely women in Troy during the sack of the city who are NOT Zendaya.
For whatever reason, AMC theaters decided to put on of those 70mm IMAX theaters in San Antonio. Not too sure why, but yeah, we’ll take it.
Two weeks ago, I set up Claude to ping the website every half hour and notify me when 70mm tickets went on sale. One weird thing: The website wasn’t showing tickets past Tuesday, July 28th. Not last week, not last weekend, not this Monday…
So when I logged in on Tuesday, I was greeted with a notice that the theater was closed for maintenance until July 30th. So I paused Claude for a couple of days, restarting it today.
Boom! 15 minutes ago I get a message from Claude - your tickets are available, here’s the open dates and times, etc. So I tried getting on the site only to be told that was rate limited because of too many Claude URL requests - I can’t buy my tickets! 
Not at all deterred, I downloaded their app, created an AMC account, and bought two tickets, 70mm, as close to the center as we could make it, for this Saturday @ 2pm.
Looking forward to it!
I’m struggling to understand the extreme enthusiasm for what is, while spectacularly realized, a classic swords and sandals picture.
How extreme? I was browsing my AMC app for something to see this weekend and noted that there is a new Spiderman movie opening this weekend. It’s a popular Marvel franchise and probably has action that would be best viewed on IMAX, so I started scrolling though AMC theaters nearby (there are at least half a dozen AMC multiplexes within 30-45 minutes drive) and there are no IMAX showings of Spiderman! The Odyssey is overshadowing a Marvel franchise release.
That’s enthusiasm for a movie.