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I find the accents distracting and the modern language a means of pulling us out of the story. Don't dress them as ancient greeks, dress them in modern clothing like a modern Shakespeare - or be consistent with dress and speech. I won't be watching it for this reason. And I loved the Argonauts

Apart from Anne Hathaway.

Like everyone sounding like New Yorkers in The Last Temptation of Christ

As long as they don't shout "fire" when commanding archers to "shoot" or "loose." I grimace when poorly researched movies do that centuries before "firearms" were invented.

Modern Greek accents would be all wrong too, so….

The only (nit-picking) bit that seemed out of place was "...Dad..."

what accent was he supposed to use?

Is this a Donnie biography?

In what would it have been less "anachronistic" to use the traditional southern-English sound of the sword-and-sandals epic? Even for English literature, the English of 16th and 17th century sounded more like North American or Irish than traditional BBC. In Homeric times English didn't exist.

It’s a shame that the most needing to see this film and have that personal introspection likely won’t.

"A collapse of basic decency"? Is that a cause or an effect?

Ngl it conjured images of raiding “pilgrims” for me

Any choice of accent in English is going to be pseudo-anachronistic— because the language did not exist yet. I say pseudo-anachronistic because there is no way to know what correctly spoken Ancient Greek sounded like. So there is no temporally correct option.

Oh c’mon on. The reason everyone has a ridiculous American accent is because most Americans actors are fucking dog shit at doing any other accent.

Guys... It's fucking fiction yo! Relax and enjoy the little things for once

There is no such thing as an "American accent". That's an incredibly ignorant thing to say.

If they sounded like ancient greeks, probably only educated greeks would understand it.

And I'll understand it a LOT better than if they had done it in Greek!

Very apropos to our current condition. The disregard of basic human decency for personal gain by the few, who already have too much, bringing about social collapse.

Disagree

If he wanted a mass audience hit, he kinda had to go this route. It's a great movie.

It’s fiction , look at all the WW2 movies with Germans speaking English with a German accent , how did that make sense . It’s better to understand the dialogue.

Or it's just a movie...made for entertainment, profit and perhaps an award or two.

Movies are an intellectual property, created for profit. A fictional movie about a fictional work. A modern artistic effort about an ancient artistic and mythical effort. The concerns about what is most real or historical or accurate is overwrought.

Concurring opinion: otterhat.substack.com/p/the-un-arm...

The Un-Armored ManChristopher Nolan's Odysseus & His Other Vulnerablesotterhat.substack.com

Saw it last night and really enjoyed it - this is not my usual genre. It was very well done. I didn’t notice the accents but a few modern words stood out as odd - Mom, Dad, Okay….👀

I don't think the box office would be as robust if he'd done it in Ancient Greek.

Why in hell would I spend money to see a @christofernolan.bsky.social movie when every day we are experiencing the assault in real time with the Mega #MAGA World wide #Trump/Putin assault on our societal, ethical, moral, humanitarian lives every minute of every day! @odysseytoys.bsky.social

Oh, is THAT it? So pretentious.

ღ+

Ffs. American accented folks who look more like vikings doing a cosplay in Scotland and trying to tell us it's the Mediterranean. Yeah, Spider-Man is looking real Mediterranean these days, let me tell you. This movie...

I mean, has the Odyssey ever been filmed in English using a Greek accent? Filming a Norse epic using a Norse accent is pretty metal-sounding. I've listened to Zorba the Greek and just don't see it happening.

If there were such a person as Odysseus, or an actual warrior upon whom the character might have been based, what accent would he have when speaking English, a language that wouldn’t evolve until thousands of years after the story supposedly took place.

I’ve seen complaints about the actors speaking with an American accent, but if the movie is in English, not Greek, what difference does it make? Would English accents sounded fancier? Australian accents maybe? Or perhaps a Scots accent?

Usually when the film covers an historic era the accent is upper (what a hubristic claim) class british.

“…atrocities of war...” One of my favorite moments comes in a flashback to Odysseus and Penelope conversing, baby Telemachus in the background. she gives the standard reason for the Greeks going to Troy, and he tells her no, the real reason is different; the Greeks are just using Helen as an excuse

it's an English *dialect.* an accent is all the mistakes one makes when speaking a foreign language. if you Babel Fish everybody into speaking English, they would speak in whatever dialect or accent they like. generally, U.S. dialects are lower prestige than UK dialects.

Yes

Yes, an American accent, for Odysseus. Sure.

Forrest Gump's Friendly WaveALT: Forrest Gump's Friendly Wavestatic.klipy.com

"Anachronistic". Were they supposed to speak in ancient Greek for "accuracy"??? Oh, I know, they were all supposed to speak in RP, right? Because THAT'S what ancient Greek characters are SUPPOSED to sound like.

If it was in British accents people would be kvetching about the quality of Damon and Hathaway’s accents. Guaranteed.You can’t win. So you might as well let the lead deliver a performance in his natural voice. And in any case, it’s not just accents. There’s cadence and intonation.

It's a great article but unfortunately most of the comments here seem to have been done before reading it

Can't stand the trope where you can tell the Russians/Germans/Hungarians/Algerians from the Yanks 'cuz they all speak with British accents. Looking at you, Star City. "For All Mankind" was assiduous in giving its Russians Russian Accents - or at least a reasonable facsimile.

I actually appreciated the lack of some tortured, invented accent, as if I had a goldfish in my ear…

It's anachronistic to use any accent other than that of Mycenaean Greek as spoken in the 12th century BCE (and nobody really knows what that sounded like). People in the past did not all speak with English accents, Masterpiece Theater be damned.

The idea of making an Odyssey for our time was obviously the right move.

Oh my. Let's rebel against Sean Connery as a Russian submarine commander, then, in a Scottish brogue thick enough to cut with a knife..

So the film is for American audiences.

Kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Or he could have done it more accurately. Personally I don''t care and am not going to see it, but gun to my head, I'd prefer a fable or epic form wherever it came from to be relatively accurate to what it was, not bending it to match its audience.

I’m glad they didn’t try to fake an ancient Greek accent.

It was definitely purposeful

I think what would have made this movie more historically accurate was to have all of the actors speaking Greek throughout the entire film.