388: The Odyssey with Neil Laird

Dan LeFebvre

00:01

Hello, and welcome to Based on a True Story, the podcast that compares your favorite Hollywood movies with history. Today, we’re digging into Christopher Nolan’s epic film, The Odyssey. Now, normally, I like to kick off each episode with a synopsis of the movie, but we’re going to skip that today because as of this recording, The Odyssey is still in the theaters, so I don’t want to have any spoilers right off the bat. Instead, I’m going to give you a spoiler alert for the rest of the episode, because when we connect with our guests for today’s episode, we’re covering the historical perspective of the key plot points in the movie.

00:35

And that means there will be spoilers for those key plot points. So if you don’t want any spoilers, I’d highly recommend watching the movie first and then maybe cue this up for the trip home from the theater. In the meantime, if you want a spoiler free episode recommendation, check out my chat with Neil Laird about the 2004 movie Troy. That’s about the Trojan War, and that can be a great to help you get more context around what you’re going to see in the Odyssey as well.

01:00

Hop in the show notes for a link to that episode. And while you’re there, check out Neil’s work because he’s coming back today to talk about the Odyssey. Neil Laird is a TV director and executive producer for over 100 programs and counting for National Geographic, BBC, Discovery, PBS, and more.

01:17

If you’ve ever seen those TV documentaries that take you to the ancient places, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Neil’s work. He’s been to the real places depicted in the movie, and he’s also the author of the Primetime Travelers series, which is about to have a new addition to the series called Primetime Troy. Once again, you can learn more about his books with the links in the show notes or on the show’s home on the web for today’s episode over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com slash 388.

01:44

Okay, now it’s time to set up our game for today’s episode. If you’re new to the show, since Based on a True Story is all about separating fact from fiction in the movies, you’ll get to practice your skills as separating fact from fiction in this podcast episode with a game of two truths and a lie. So I’m about to give you three little facts that we’ll talk about in this episode.

02:03

Two of those are true, and one of them is just an all-out lie. Are you ready? Okay, here they are.

02:10

Number one, Telemachus is Odysseus and Penelope’s son. Number two, Odysseus travels to Hades to speak to the dead. Number three, Menelaus came up with the idea for the Trojan horse.

02:26

Got him? Okay, now as you’re listening to our story today, see if you can figure out which one of those is a lie. And if you’re watching the video version of this, you can see I’m holding up an envelope.

02:34

This has the answer inside, and we’ll open it at the end of the episode to see if you got it right. And this is your final spoiler alert, because it’s time to connect with Neil Laird about the historical accuracy of the Odyssey.

Dan LeFebvre

02:54

As longtime listeners of Based on a True Story know, I always like to start off with a letter grade for the historical accuracy of a movie. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Homer’s Odyssey wasn’t ever supposed to be a true history of events. I’ve always been under the impression it’s more like what we’d call a historical novel today. Some elements of history mixed with some elements of fact, fiction to tell a good story. So I’d like to start off with a two-part question.

03:19

One, was Homer’s Odyssey supposed to be a telling of actual historical events? And then two, instead of a historical accuracy for the movie, can you give us a letter grade for how well the movie adheres to Homer’s original version of the story?

Neil Laird

03:31

Sure. And it’s two very different questions in a way, because when Homer was writing this, I don’t think people were looking for veracity or historical fiction, or even history was already, you know, woven in with myth and stuff. There was no delineation mark into what was true and what was not, I think.

03:48

The key thing to remember is Homer was writing about the so-called Trojan War four or five hundred years after it supposedly happened. So by the time he was telling this story, it was already intermixed with other people telling it. If Homer was one person or not, we don’t even know.

04:03

But if he did exist, he was just hearing all this stuff that was being retold and retold and retold and added and subtracted over the centuries. So he was already so far from when the events of the Bronze Age Troy happened that he couldn’t have possibly known the truth. And anybody sitting under that tree listening and wouldn’t have known it either.

04:23

They were not going to the museum. They did not have a cheat sheet. They were not Googling it.

04:28

They knew nothing except for what that blind man was telling them. And that was So as long as it’s a good story. It’s a good tale.

04:35

You know, it’s a boring night here in Corinth. You know, let’s gather on the olive tree and hear a story.

Dan LeFebvre

04:42

So what would your letter grade be for how well it adheres to his story then?

Neil Laird

04:46

And I thought about this. It’s interesting because at first, knowing the text so well, of course, having just written a book about it, I was in a rabbit hole for a year. But that surprisingly is faithful.

04:57

He’s made some interesting changes we’ll talk about. But I say in terms of staying close to Homer’s version, I’d give it an A minus. Wow. OK.

05:06

even a B plus somewhere in that vague area. But yeah, he clearly knows and loves his Homer and he didn’t want to lose the important bits. He just condensed and moved things around for a modern audience.

Dan LeFebvre

05:18

Sure, which you would expect in a movie anyway. What Homer was doing. Just following the source.

Neil Laird

05:25

Yeah, exactly.

Dan LeFebvre

05:27

Well, you’re talking about the Trojan War and there are a lot of elements of the Trojan War in the movie. And the last time we talked, we talked about the 2004 Troy movie starring Brad Pitt It’s a fun little fact trick. Christopher Nolan was originally going to direct that movie before it ultimately went to Wolfgang Peterson.

05:43

But we do see some overlap of the characters in both movies. There’s Odysseus. He’s played by Matt Damon in The Odyssey.

05:48

He’s played by Sean Bean in 2004’s Troy. Menelaus is played by Brennan Gleeson in the 2004 movie and then portrayed by Jon Bernthal in this one. There’s also overlap of the story.

05:58

In 2004’s Troy, it kind of focuses on the Trojan War itself. And then The Odyssey has flashbacks of the war, but it’s mostly set after the war is over and the men are trying to return home. So I know we’re really talking about the 2026, the Odyssey today, but can you fill in some historical context that we know around maybe these two tales and how they’re tied together?

06:17

Well, we don’t know.

Neil Laird

06:18

Again, we’re talking so far in history. It’s not like, oh, that was a hit. Let’s do a sequel.

06:22

It’s not quite like today. It’s, but again, Homer, and I always have people cautious. A lot of people do things that was a Homer, but again, he could have just been the name they put on these two epic poems about the Trojan War. The first one, Trojan War, if everyone’s remember the Iliad, which is the first one sequentially, it only takes place over no more than six weeks. It’s just the last six weeks of the war doesn’t include the Trojan horse and it doesn’t end with the fall of Troy. It’s all about characters that are really surprisingly not mentioned at all in this book. While you mentioned the characters are in this one, there’s no mention of Achilles. There’s no mention of Patroclus. There’s no Prime. There’s no Hector. There is no Paris. They’re not mentioned at all. And they, of course, are the principal characters in the emotional core of the Iliad here. And I think Christopher Nolan did this wisely. And we talk about 80s. It’s a very interesting choice he made because Achilles is a big part of that. He doesn’t appear here. So it comes out after sequentially, whether it was something that people told years later because they loved it, we don’t know. But the only overlap is the fact that Odysseus gets his own spinoff. That’s really what it is.

Dan LeFebvre

07:41

So maybe not a sequel as far as the books, but in the movie, it’s kind of like a sequel.

Neil Laird

07:45

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan LeFebvre

07:48

Well, you talked about it in one of the overlapping stories in both the 2004 Troy movie and then 2026 as the Odyssey is the concept of the Trojan horse. And in the Odyssey, it’s literally just a wooden horse. There’s no wheels or anything extra. It’s just a horse that’s actually half buried in the sand. As the tides come in, some of the men drown inside before the Trojans find it and then move it into the city. And then, of course, we know what happens there. How well do you think

Neil Laird

08:12

the Odyssey visualizes the story of the Trojan horse? Well, it’s interesting. First of all, the Iliad doesn’t mention it at all because, you know, everything happens.

08:22

You don’t see the fall of Troy at all. It’s only mentioned very, very briefly, even in the Odyssey, which is very interesting. It’s just kind of mentioned in a paragraph.

08:32

You don’t get inside that horse. They talk about Odysseus being clever and being the one to come up with it. But beyond that, it’s almost given this cursory knockoff.

08:42

This is how the war ended. Let’s get on with the adventure home. So it’s fascinating how we spend so much time talking about the Trojan Hors.

08:50

In both the film versions, they talk about it. They give it far more scene work. They give it far more focus than Homer ever did in either epic.

Dan LeFebvre

09:00

Do we know, like, how did it become so popular then? I mean, why do you think we focus on it so much?

Neil Laird

09:05

I think it’s a great story. And the thing about the Odyssey and the Iliad, it’s been retold again and again, which is why we can’t grouse about Christopher Nolan telling his version. You know, we have the Enid, you know, talking about it, Virgil.

09:22

And it’s mentioned in there as well, I believe. That’s the Roman version of how Rome was set up. It’s one of those things that’s so visual.

09:28

I think it just catches on after the fact. I’ve done so many shows when I was a documentary filmmaker about what the Trojan horse could have been. Could have been a battering ram, could have been a ship.

09:39

People love to kind of go back to this well and try to figure it out. Because in the face of it, and something else I mentioned in my book, it’s kind of absurd. It’s hard to imagine anyone falling for this thing.

09:49

One thing that Nolan did, I thought was brilliant, that Wolfgang Peterson did not do, and he probably should have because there’s more time focused on it, is he leaves it as a berry in the sand. The whole thing is rather being a gift, you know, never beware Greeks bearing gifts. That’s, of course, where the phrase comes from.

10:07

In Troy, 2004, it’s offered to King Prime and the Trojans and left behind. It’s sort of like, you know, peace offering because we’ve left and we did it for Athena, but you can have it. But Nolan makes it buried as if it’s abandoned, as if it was never meant to go inside.

10:23

That it’s this thing they didn’t need and they scurried away and left it. So that was a brilliant device to make them think like, well, you know, we might as well take it because obviously it was never meant as anything. Couldn’t possibly be a ruse.

10:37

It was just abandoned by people who fled.

Dan LeFebvre

10:39

Right, right, spoils of war almost.

Neil Laird

10:41

Yeah, exactly, yeah. It spoils of war, yeah, exactly.

Dan LeFebvre

10:44

Yeah. Well, it sounds like the movie version is correct then because in the way it shows Odysseus being the one that comes up with it, would that be correct then?

Neil Laird

10:53

It is, yes. Odysseus in, once again, it’s not mentioned a lot in The Odyssey, not mentioned at all in Iliad. And he is said, you know, he’s sort of the POV character or whoever it was, or those third person.

11:08

And it’s mentioned that he kind of saves the war by creating the horse. So it is attributed to him. And again, we can talk about this whenever, but I think one of the biggest differences between Homer version of the Odyssey and Nolan’s is that the character of Odysseus, he’s much more of this wily character.

11:29

He’s much more of this sort of too clever by half guy. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but he’s also arrogant and makes a lot of mistakes. And I have to think that happened in the Odyssey is because it went to his head and he just made dumb, dumb decisions.

11:41

But he’s the one in the, someone mentioned it in an article, an interview I was reading today or some review, saying he was sort of the hand solo to Luke Skywalker, the first one. He was that wry character on the side that was too smart for the room, but he didn’t really imagine him as being anything more than kind of like the gruff, witty, you know, secondary player. Well, he gravitates toward to become the lead after everybody else is dead in the second one.

12:08

And he’s that character in Homer. But he’s a much more morose, much more thoughtful, much less clever, you know, trickster than he is in the original in Nolan’s version. A very interesting choice.

Dan LeFebvre

12:22

Well, if we head back into the movie after the Trojan War, a majority of the movie that is about the long journey home for Odysseus. That’s why we use the term Odyssey today to refer to a long journey. Along the way, Odysseus and his men need to stop on land to restock provisions.

12:36

And when they do that, they run into a number of challenges. The first time they find land, they follow a sheep into a cave that just so happens to be the home of a huge cyclops. It kills many of the men before they manage to escape.

12:47

Then the next land that they find turns out to be the home of giants and silver armor that slaughter even more of their men. It seems like every time Odysseus and his men make land, they end up running back to their ships just barely in the nick of time. Well, I guess for some of them, each encounter ends up having more and more men dying along the way. And I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that some of those foes were part of the reason why maybe even the ancient Greeks didn’t think that Homer’s Odyssey was entirely factual. But did the movie accurately show us the sort of enemies across various lands that Odysseus encountered on his journey home? It did. I mean, he changes,

Neil Laird

13:24

he condenses a few, changes the order of one or two. But yes, that’s exactly the beast and the trouble. Everything is about preventing Odysseus and his crew from getting home. Everything isn’t just an obstacle. When you get to Circe, when we get to Ecclipsa, they’re all different ways to prevent them from seeing home. So Homer’s creating all kinds of obstacles, be they cyclopses or giants throwing boulders, that prevents them that. I don’t think the audience from Bronze Age, Greece, or wherever, thought these creatures were real. What’s interesting is I did a documentary years ago, series for Discovery Channel called Mythical Beasts. I remember one episode we did where they would find, they were finding dinosaur bones in the 1800s or whatever, triceratops or things like that. And if those were found earlier, people could look at them a couple hundred years later and say, could that have been a cyclox? Because like a triceratops, a big hole for the horn or…

14:21

So, you know, if they’re looking for bones, if people come across it, they may think that people in the past had this. But keep in mind that when they were listening to it, it was already half a millennia later. So it’s like us talking about the Dark Ages, King Arthur and all that stuff.

14:37

Dragons could have existed in 716 AD. We don’t know. They all died off. So it’s highly possible people believed it in a way. That’s the way it was in the olden days, but not anymore.

Dan LeFebvre

14:48

That’s a fascinating aspect that I hadn’t really thought about that. It makes you wonder. I mean, I guess it just makes me wonder, hundreds of years from now, what will people think of things that we believe today?

Neil Laird

15:02

Oh, I love that. There was a wonderful book years ago. You should think it up called Hotel of Mysteries.

15:09

And this is to the side. You can cut this out if you want. But it was the 80s or 90s, and it was written as an archaeologist in the future came across a Motel 6 or some sort of road.

Dan LeFebvre

15:18

Oh, Motel Mystery. I think I’ve seen that. Yeah, I think I’ve read that. Yeah, yeah.

Neil Laird

15:21

And it was just, and everything’s wrong. Everything, everything is a votive thing. I remember the biggest, the toilet bowl seat was supposed to be the crown of the king. And the toilet, of course, was the throne. That’s how we look at the past. We assume everything is more important sometimes than it is. It could have just been a, you know.

Dan LeFebvre

15:39

Everything is this major religious sanctuary that this is the most important part of the.

Neil Laird

15:45

Exactly. And just some dive out there in Route 30.

Dan LeFebvre

15:50

Well, you mentioned briefly one of the places that the men land on in the movie turns out to be inhabited by something other than a fierce army trying to kill them. It’s actually something a little more unsettling. While Odysseus is left behind with the ship to hunt for food in sort of a kind of a mini mutiny by the men over so many deaths that’s happening.

16:07

Odysseus men venture inland when they pass by some big cats. There’s like a lion, a panther, a tiger, all leading up to the home of a single woman living inside named Cersei. She’s played by Samantha Morton.

16:18

And at first, she seems scared by the men entering her home. Understandably, there’s these warriors entering her home, but then they reassure her that they mean no harm and they just need food, so she offers them some food. And then as the men eat, they just can’t seem to stop eating.

16:32

They just keep eating and eating. Meanwhile, down by the ships, Odysseus shoots a deer to approach, and then he approaches the dead body to find that it’s actually a dead man lying there. And Cersei’s food seems to put some sort of a spell on Odysseus’ men.

16:47

she transforms them into the pigs in this really uh kind of a strange scene where she’s like molding them almost like pottery but then when Odysseus realizes that there’s something sinister at play on the island he almost falls into Cersei’s trap before he notices one of the men’s rings and bull and then he says that he’ll kill Cersei’s crow which is actually her sister if she doesn’t turn the men back so she does and that’s it seems crazy but that’s kind of a nutshell of that whole scene and that’s how Odysseus finds out that he needs to get home through Hades at the end Cersei kind of gives him the path back home. How much of this storyline that we see in the movie happening with Cersei happened in Homer’s Odyssey?

Neil Laird

17:24

Just about everything you said actually does. It’s faithful, but he changes the tone where Odysseus doesn’t figure out himself that his men have been turned to pigs by going there. I think one of them escapes and comes down and tells him.

17:39

And then as he’s going up the mountain to save them, I believe it’s Hermes, the god Hermes, god of war, gives him a potion. I think it’s called Polly or something. I don’t know what it could have been.

17:52

Molly. It’s called Molly. That’s what it was.

17:54

Some sort of herb or whatever that prevents him from falling victim to it. So he goes in knowing already. And when he sits down, he instantly draws his sword, which we see in the Nolan version.

18:07

And she quickly capitulates. She also realizes the spell is not going to work. Everything’s going to fall apart.

18:13

And she is the offspring of a god already. It gets very kind of convoluted who’s there, why she’s there. She’s sort of been sent to the side, and she’s not kind of happy.

18:21

But in this case, she instantly restores them. And not only does she restore them, but they stay for a year on the islet. She becomes Odysseus’ lover.

18:34

And the others stay there, and they’re in no rush to get home at this point, I guess. They’re eating well, and they’re hanging out. And she becomes an ally.

18:41

And it’s only when someone comes and says he has to leave and go, I think is when you go once again, he could have stayed there and had a long, happy life with her. I think it’s the men. I think the men finally get itchy and say, OK, it’s time to go after a year.

18:55

They’re waiting for his love to fall off. But so she’s a much less sinister character in that. But the rest of the thing else you mentioned all does happen to turn the pigs and all.

19:05

That’s one of those classic scenes in the book. And Odysseus does sort of save the day. But he has help. It’s not just that he goes in there and he catches himself.

19:16

Thank God the gods intervene. The gods are almost nowhere to be seen in this, which is a very interesting choice, just like Wolfgang Peterson did in Troy. And it’s probably the right choice. But in this case, it looks like he came up with a solution himself when all the way through the Odyssey, he’s getting help.

Dan LeFebvre

19:31

Yeah, which is interesting because, yeah, in Nolan’s version of the Odyssey, like I mentioned, he shoots the deer and then he sees it’s a human body. almost instantly he seems to know that there’s something sinister, which to me kind of tells me that he already has this belief that there could be something magical going on or there could be these elements going on and he can figure it out by himself without any outside help.

Neil Laird

19:54

But I also think, and I don’t mind that, I don’t mind seeing the extra help because you want your hero to be a hero, but I do think the turn is a bit quick. I think it’s a weak moment. She’s quite good in the film, Morton, but she turns very quick.

20:06

Okay, you’re right, I’ll restore them. where before she simply couldn’t fight him because he had the gods on his side and he had a potion that prevented him from turning into whatever animal she wanted. So she knew she was sort of stivy.

Dan LeFebvre

20:21

The movie doesn’t really explain much of Cersei’s story. She’s kind of hanging out on the island by herself.

Neil Laird

20:26

I forget. I’m not the person to talk about that mythology, but I think she’s banished there. She’s a daughter of a god, and forgive me, I didn’t. don’t retain exactly what the backstory was before Homer, but she sort of sent there in exile.

Dan LeFebvre

20:44

Okay.

Neil Laird

20:44

So you can imagine why she’s a bit grumpy.

Dan LeFebvre

20:47

Yeah. I mean, she’s kind of there by herself. It was kind of strange that she’s just there and seems to, uh, because I mean, I’m assuming all the other animals that we see, like with the deer. And then I’m assuming that the big cats that we see, those are all other men that have just happened upon the island.

Neil Laird

21:03

You wonder how many people come looking, but looking for food. I guess it’s kind of like, it’s like, It’s like a truck stop. Let’s pull over here and get some fixings and we’ll move on.

Dan LeFebvre

21:12

Yeah, I think there actually is almost a little nod to that too. If I remember right, when the men, she tells them to take the armor off out in the back. And then you kind of see that there’s other armor that’s laying there.

Neil Laird

21:25

But grass is kind of grown over. This is what she does.

Dan LeFebvre

21:27

Yeah, yeah.

Neil Laird

21:29

Red flag. Right. I’m going to move on.

21:31

You know what? I’m not going to have that stew. I think I’m going to.

21:34

There’s a nice chicken stop up the street. I’m going to hit that.

Dan LeFebvre

21:36

There you go. Well, after they leave Cersei’s island, she tells Odysseus that he must go to Hades. He does, and while he’s there, he speaks to many of the dead men who fought beside him at Troy.

21:47

One of them is Sinon, who was the soldier that they left behind to tell the lie about the Trojan horse being a gift to Athena. And he also learns there that Agamemnon was murdered by his wife upon his return in retaliation for his sacrificing their daughter for favorable win at the start of the war. And then from this encounter, again, is when Sinan asks Odysseus to pay back the disgrace to Antinous, the rich child who Sinan was sent to war and his death in place of.

22:18

And there also Agamemnon warns Odysseus not to make the same mistake that he did by returning as a hero and instead hide himself and assess the situation of his return. Was this scene in Hades close to Homer’s Odyssey?

Neil Laird

22:31

Except for Agamemnon was there and the guy who tells him to avoid eating the the the cattle that was there. But really was the big difference that that that Nolan has made. And it’s an interesting one. It’s not about the hero of the war.

22:49

The biggest person people remember that that he meets in Hades is Achilles, who was there and saying very famous quote saying that I would rather be the pauper. alive today than be the king of the dead now. Don’t follow my lead. Don’t be the glorious hero.

23:08

It’s not worth it. So all these people, his mother comes up to him, who’s not in here, crying, say, I died waiting for you. So a lot of it is the people in his past that come there. But here, I think Nolan wants to make it very much about his own grief about the dead that died on his watch.

23:28

the whole I’m supposed to say Sinon

Dan LeFebvre

23:33

I pronounce it Sinon S-I-N-O-N and it actually comes from Virgil

Neil Laird

23:39

that’s not in Homer at all that character does not exist in Homer that is a Latin Roman edition later on so that whole thing and even then he plays with that idea where he doesn’t trick him at all he doesn’t You know, you see him at the beginning guarding the horse, and he’s very angry in death that you lied to me. But even in the Aeneid, he knows it’s a ruse, and he knows that his part is to convince them that it really is an abandoned gift to it. So he’s in on the roots.

24:15

Here he’s being manipulated, and that whole thing is a creation of Nolan. And as we see as we get towards the end, you see why, because his grief is all about the people that he let die. It’s not about the heroes. It’s no longer about Achilles. It’s no longer about Agamemnon. It really is about the people that he let perish on his watch in his hubris, in his one-time destruction of culture and people and civilization.

Dan LeFebvre

24:44

Yeah, and it kind of seems to be adding a little bit here and there. This is one part of it, but also the element of his decision to be the one to come up with the Trojan horse and that whole element. Right, right. Kind of starting some of this destruction.

Neil Laird

25:00

I mean, he brought down Troy, and that’s why, if we jump to the end, why he feels so terrible about it at the end. There is none of that sense of, I shouldn’t have done this in Hover. In that age, you wouldn’t have even talked about that.

25:14

It wasn’t about feeling sorry for war because it was a very brutal time. They were in constant state of war back then. So that whole strand of his guilt.

25:25

If you look at most of Nolan’s films, it’s all about the guys feeling guilty about what they did or about their remorse or those kind of things looking back. So it was very keeping with his canon, but it’s not from Homer.

Dan LeFebvre

25:37

Okay, okay. Yeah, that’s interesting. As you mentioned, that kind of ties back into with Oppenheimer.

Neil Laird

25:43

that moment of him doing that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah if he regressed everything you did

Dan LeFebvre

25:48

exactly yeah well earlier we talked about some of the enemies on land but i’d like to shift to the seas now because after the men leave cersei’s place they encounter a series of challenges on the seas first they have to survive the song of the sirens all the men put wax in their ears but odysseus decides to be tied to the mass so he can be the only one to hear the song and survive the movie doesn’t let us hear the song but watching Matt Damon’s version of Odysseus reacting it seems to be quite a torturous song one of the men even takes the wax out of his ears and jumps in the water to swim to where the sirens are and presumably then to his death but then after surviving the Song of Sirens there’s a huge whirlpool Odysseus knows that that will kill all of them but if they avoid it only six of the men will be killed by Scylla the monster on the cliff and that’s exactly what happens we see these huge tentacles coming out of the cliff and taking some of the men from the boat as it passes. Was the movie true to the source material for these challenges that Odysseus faced with his men on the seas?

Neil Laird

26:48

Yeah, I would say 85% absolutely. The sirens were very much calling them to shipwreck and he did want to listen to it. I never thought about it until I watched the film.

27:01

Why does he want to listen to it? I mean, what help is it by hearing it? I didn’t think about that when I read the text, but it was like both arrogant and was also both unnecessary.

27:09

You should have plugged your ears up too and just moved on. Because there were two changes in both the stories. They’re small ones and they’re obviously done for dramatic effect.

27:19

In the siren scene, we have the young guy who, one of the sailors, one plugs his ears and dives in. That doesn’t happen in Homer. No one dies.

27:27

They just, everyone just follows his ear. They watch him and say, I don’t want to hear what he’s hearing or whatever and they move on. So that scene was just added, I guess, to pump up the drama of, how horrible and how you know how much of a laura was and it’s an interesting um change which i don’t quite understand why he did i’m curious what you think um when he has to choose from the world pool and the and the the flesh-eating monster in in nolan’s version in the film version he makes it sound like a second in command overrules him and chooses he says let’s go to the world pool and they don’t believe him anymore say no no we’re gonna go this way instead and then they eat so i don’t but in in homer he’s the one that says no we’re not going to whirlpool he chooses where they’re going no one was questioning his authority at all so it’s interesting why they did that i guess is to show the men are ready to but immediately they don’t know we trust him their faith is in him is

Dan LeFebvre

28:23

starting to dim what did you think about when you saw that well i thought because um when that was in the sequence of events because it was cersei that that kind of told him what was going to happen and in some of those you know like with the war call everybody was going to die so he knew these things but he didn’t tell his men all of these things but also it was on cersei’s island that they kind of had that little meaning mutiny so the impression that i got was he doesn’t think his men will uh do what he says it’s almost like they he had the impression that they’re going to do the opposite of what he says anyway because they don’t trust his leadership anymore i didn’t

Neil Laird

29:00

think that was earned i thought that was a false note because it wasn’t like we were seeing it build up that except for the mutiny scene there yeah we didn’t see his command it wasn’t like a a you know captain bligh thing where everything is moving right it was just suddenly he says i’ll tell the wrong things how do you know he’s going to overrule him i think okay we’ll do the world pull then they’re all going to die so it was just an interesting thing i’m not sure why he did it It’s probably for what we guess, but it wasn’t in Homer, and I’m not sure they needed it.

Dan LeFebvre

29:30

Yeah, that’s interesting. In Homer’s version, did Odysseus know any of those things ahead of time and not tell his men? He knew exactly what was in the film.

Neil Laird

29:40

He knew that they would all die if they went to the World Bowl, and only six would die if they chose the awful critter. So he knew that going in. So he already just chose that as he got there. He saw the difference. He saw which way to go, and he went right instead of left.

Dan LeFebvre

29:53

Did he tell his men that?

Neil Laird

29:55

I don’t think he did, no. I don’t think so.

Dan LeFebvre

29:58

Okay.

Neil Laird

29:58

I don’t even think they know. I don’t think they ever hear in Homer. A classicist might correct me on this. I don’t think he ever says, oh, the gods say you’re all going to die.

Dan LeFebvre

30:08

Yeah. Well, the impression that I got from the movie’s version was because of their, with that little mutiny, even though as small as it was, it was because of the decisions that Odysseus was making was causing so many of them to die. I got the impression that he couldn’t make a decision that he knew would make them die.

30:32

They wouldn’t go along with that in any way. I mean, I don’t know. It was an interesting decision.

Neil Laird

30:37

I mean, it was his choice, and he sort of had the right to make it. I didn’t think they needed it. I didn’t think it was earned, as I say. I didn’t feel like they would mutiny that quickly because everything else he was doing that was being accepted by them was just that one little moment.

Dan LeFebvre

30:53

Yeah, yeah, which maybe would make more sense. Maybe they’ll come out with an extended edition and have a little more explanation of that.

Neil Laird

30:59

There’s 20 minutes on the floor where we see, it’s a mutiny montage. The mutiny montage, there we go. They did some 80s music.

Dan LeFebvre

31:10

The Eye of the Tiger, okay.

Neil Laird

31:11

Exactly. You took the words right out of my mouth. There we go.

Dan LeFebvre

31:16

Well, if we go back to the movie, after they’re surviving so much, there’s one last plot of land men find. It’s an island where the sun god Apollo keeps his herds of cattle, and Cersei had warned that Odysseus’s men would kill the cattle, angering the gods and then leading to their death. So at this point, Odysseus actually warns the men and tells them not to kill any of the cows, and they agree not to, but they have to make land to get water and repair their ships, because as they were turning to avoid the whirlpool, like a bunch of their oars broke, and so they have to repair the ship. And that seems to work for a while, but then the winds that brought them into the island never change. And after a somewhat undetermined amount of time, they just talk about how their provisions run out. So it must’ve been a long time. And then the men end up killing a cow, angering the gods anyway. And then the wind finally dies down. And that just kind of turns out to be a trap that lured them into the ocean. So the guy to the sea, Poseidon could kill the men, but Odysseus himself wasn’t involved in that. He didn’t kill the cow. So Zeus won’t let him be killed. Instead, their boat is split in half and Odysseus is sent adrift. Well, we can presume that his men are all killed at sea. How well does the movie depict this whole plot around Apollo’s cattle

Neil Laird

32:25

and the rest of Odysseus’ men dying? That’s pretty spot on. That’s pretty much how it appeared in the epic poem. There’s not too many changes there. So he really just kept to the point of that, kept to the bone of that, because it really is them sort of giving up in a way. That is them finally succumbing to their own fate.

32:45

And Odysseus has no part of it. He also has a protection the Gauze members and they’re whispering his ear where the guys are not. So he always has a bit of help.

32:53

But I don’t think he had protection this time. He just knew not to eat the cattle. But all that comes right from the source.

Dan LeFebvre

32:59

Do we know how long they were on there for?

Neil Laird

33:02

Because the movie is kind of vague about that. I don’t recall. No, I don’t think they do. And they always exaggerate. They always say, like, you know, there were 16 years.

Dan LeFebvre

33:09

It could have been. Well, you’re talking about being on Circe’s Island for over a year. I mean, that’s not anything like what we see in the movie. No, it all happens at 10 minutes.

Neil Laird

33:17

They just leave and they go. They don’t know that they bed down and become lovers, and everyone else goes off and hunts and fishes for a year. So, you know, dates are always loose.

33:27

So you go back to the Elyia, they say the war went on for 10 years, and Odysseus has been gone for 20. That’s a long time. And we even talk about distances because it’s all a bit silly.

33:36

And I do, as you know, I do cruise lectures talking about, among other things, Troy in my books. And I cruise the Aegean all the time. And you can get from Troy to Sicily in a day and a half.

33:48

It ain’t that long. It isn’t that hard to cross the Aegean.

Dan LeFebvre

33:51

But you’re not oaring like that. You’re not rowing like that.

Neil Laird

33:54

Yeah, that’s true. It’s true. I’m on a Holland America.

34:02

But the point is, of course, they were blown off course. But if you look at interactive maps and things of where they think things could have been, and of course, no one can know, what are you talking about? The Aegean, the Greek islands, Sicily and Italy, and maybe down in Malta or something, Crete, it’s not that far.

34:22

So these places are not huge distances. So it’s hard to imagine it took them 10 years to get home, even with all those complications.

Dan LeFebvre

34:30

During that time period, were those areas mapped? Like, would they have known? Oh, sure.

Neil Laird

34:36

Yeah, I mean, look, I think this is, you know, pre-Greek, this is 1000 BC. When it happened, they said that the Trojan War happened as maybe 1100, 1200 BC, right before the collapse of the Bronze Age. And those places were not Greek yet, but you had the Mycenaeans, you had the Phoenicians, you had the, who was on, the Minoans of Crete.

35:02

So you already had these cultures. Egypt was in full soul glory. In fact, Egypt was already 2,000 years old at the time.

35:07

So history was not, the world was not young at that point. Civilization had been around for 2,000 or 3,000 years. So these places were pretty well mapped and pretty well documented at this point.

35:19

They may still have been rough. And they had one very interesting thing they brought up, totally new. And you didn’t have this in your question, but it bears mentioning very briefly.

35:27

It shows that this film was made in 2026. I made so many documentaries and know so many people who are archaeologists and stuff. One of the greatest discussions of the last 20 years is the collapse of the Bronze Age, what happened around 1100.

35:43

And the villains and the foes of the day are the Sea Peoples, which people would even talk about 20 years ago. The Sea Peoples are historically seen to be a band of Sea Peoples who came probably from the rest, maybe from Spain or something. They couldn’t think of a better name.

36:00

And they wrote Roughshod over and brought all these cultures down. And they mentioned the Sea Peoples many times in the Odyssey. And it’s very interesting because, of course, you guarantee you Homer or Virgil knew nothing about them when he was writing their versions of it.

36:14

But I guess it was a bit of contemporary historical nuggets talking about the time, trying to place it in there. because all these cultures were soon, including Mycenae, where Agamemnon had his capital in the Peloponnese, they all collapsed by the Sea People during that time. All of the Bronze Age collapsed.

36:36

They even had a fairly ropey scene, or didn’t somebody say, the age of what we call bronze is about to end, which I thought was a bit too on the nose, because I don’t think they called it the Bronze Age mirror in it. Lord, no, we thought. But it’s interesting, he’s already looking back in history.

36:49

this is the end of our soon we will be we will be placed by an iron aid what is iron yeah

Dan LeFebvre

36:59

well i was a good i mean we were talking about mapping areas i was going to actually ask about the sea people then because that what you’re talking about that it made me think of i think there was a scene with um with penelope and she was they’re talking about the the sea people coming and i kind of got the sense as i was watching the movie that they have no idea what’s beyond their borders. Like they have no idea who these people are. They just need to be ready in case somebody comes and attacks, which almost kind of then leads me to think, you know, these other places where Odysseus lands, like with the giants and the armor and these elements that that’s just another civilization that’s just waiting for somebody to land on their shore and attack them.

Neil Laird

37:37

And they don’t really know what’s beyond their shores. The world’s very small back then. It’s funny, I’m wearing a t-shirt about Gibraltar, which I go to a lot of my cruises. I always do talks about it. And if you know anything about Gibraltar, it was called the Pillars of Hercules.

37:51

And that was because that was considered the end of the known world. And Gibraltar, of course, is the tip of Spain. And it’s the closest point between Africa and Europe. And that’s Gibraltar.

38:03

And people, they call it the Pillars of Hercules because you can see both shores as you came up. Nobody went back there. It’s like, after you go back there, you’re off the map. You know, here be dragons is where you get to when you leave there. So that was the end of civilization. So I think the sea people may have come right from the other side of that on the curve of Spain that went up past the pillars of Hercules.

38:23

But again, we’re not talking about a large. We’re talking about the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean was their world.

38:30

So anything beyond that, forget about the Atlantic. That might as well have been deepest, darkest, nowheresville. So they still had the fear of monsters and dragons and whatever leads beyond.

38:41

So to get back to your early question, it’s highly possible some people sitting listening to that still believed in those creatures. But it’s unlikely they thought they were in Crete or Malta or Sicily.

Dan LeFebvre

38:53

This is maybe kind of beyond there’s nothing that we see in the movie necessarily, but just makes me wonder for the peoples then. Would they have used some of these creatures and some of these things as a means of controlling their people and keeping them from venturing out?

Neil Laird

39:10

Oh, absolutely. I mean, a lot of it, of course, was all. Yeah, I mean, the God, the creatures would be out there. I certainly think the pillars of Hercules, because everybody wanted to control the strait, even back then, if you control Gibraltar, you control what came in and out of the Mediterranean.

39:27

So, you know, any ships that come from afar, people were clearly living elsewhere on the coast of Europe and up the coast of northern Europe. So if you if you told people don’t go there, you’re going to die and they won’t, then you control the sea routes. And that’s the key thing. And that’s a different thing. That’s the key reason why the Trojan War probably happened.

39:48

It wasn’t about Ellen. It was about controlling the sea routes going into Turkey and going into the mainland of Asia. So people are already thinking about commerce.

39:56

They’re already thinking about where they can get ahead back then. And if they can terrify people by saying, here’ll be dragons. People never left their small village somewhere in the Peloponnese.

40:06

What would they know about dragons in Spain?

Dan LeFebvre

40:08

Yeah, yeah. So Homer is just disinformation, just selling.

Neil Laird

40:12

He’s just making that shit up as he goes, man. It’s fake news is what it is. Homer’s nothing but fake news.

Dan LeFebvre

40:18

The original fake news. Well, if we go back to the movie, after the shipwreck at sea, Odysseus wakes up on this deserted island with Charlize Theron’s version of Calypso. And we see bits and pieces of this actually happening throughout the movie as she’s kind of nursing Odysseus back to health, and he’s starting to remember what happened. But eventually he finds out that he’s been there for seven years, and Calypso admits that she’s fallen in love with him. What did you think of how the movie interpreted Odysseus on Calypso’s island? Well, what’s interesting, he combines two

Neil Laird

40:52

because she wasn’t the Lotus. She didn’t have the Lotus. There was a Lotus Eaters.

40:56

It was a very small place they stopped at very early in their journey. I think it was Cyclops or something. And they get slowed down for a while and realize, dude, we need to get out.

41:06

We drank too much. Let’s get back. Let’s call an Uber and get out of here.

41:10

And they quickly moved on. But they put the Lotus in her scenes. And in truth, he stops at the island after everybody dies.

41:21

That’s all right. and he is just so grief-stricken about losing everybody that she comforts him and they fall in love. And yet the entire time he doesn’t forget, which is very strange why he doesn’t get on with it.

41:35

And it makes sense why we have to dumb dull his memory with drugs or whatever to make him forget about Penelope and his responsibilities back home. But he is not all looped out and drugged. He’s there and presumably just getting in on with a Charlize Theron character, you know, on a deserted island.

41:53

There could be worse fates, I suppose. So he sticks around a while. But there are a lot of scenes of him on the shore crying.

42:00

Every day he cries, looking towards Ithaca, hoping to get home. So he doesn’t forget. So it’s very curious why he doesn’t do it.

42:08

And she wants to keep him there. She promises him immortal life. Now, the Circe II, you know, the same thing.

42:16

Please stay with me. And he does for a while, for a year. Here, she promises him immortal life.

42:21

I mean, this wife stays for seven years. I don’t know. But eventually the gods come to him, come to her and say he has to move on.

42:28

And so she releases him and says goodbye. And he says goodbye to her. And then he moves on.

42:33

So it’s a very strange sequence where he’s resting and everybody’s gone. And for whatever reason, maybe gives up hope. But he never forgets.

42:42

There are no lotuses on her island.

Dan LeFebvre

42:45

Interesting. And as you’re saying that, it makes me wonder, because in the movie, it’s it is very self-driven. I mean, he kind of forgets, but he is very self-driven to get back home through the whole thing, which is, I would think, something that we can all kind of connect to, you know, the desire to get back home after.

43:04

But as you’re talking about that, you know, the gods saying that he has to get on with it and that element and the gods talking in his ear. It almost sounds like in Homer’s version of the Odyssey, the gods are really the ones that are driving him to get home. And Odysseus is just like, I’m good here.

43:20

Like, I’m just going to hang out here.

Neil Laird

43:21

Yes and no, because the gods are always battling and meddling and always doing them more to piss each other up up in Mount Olympus than they are to help this mortal down below. So some are helping him, some are not. Poseidon’s blowing him off course, and that is all because of Cyclops’ incidents.

43:38

He didn’t have to kill. There’s a very interesting story in the Cyclops, a very famous, one of the most famous quotes there, which Nolan takes out. He’s very chatty.

43:50

The Cyclops is very chatty in the book and they have conversations and they, and he’s there for some time. They’re having talks and playing games. I mean, word games, they’re all this kind of like, they’re, they’re stuck in this and our friends, but they’re stuck here and they have conversations the entire time.

44:06

And one of the questions that, um, the Cyclops ask, uh, just, he says, what is your name? And he says, my name is nobody. So when he finally gets out, the other Cyclopses run to help their poor comrade.

44:22

And they say, who did this to you? Nobody did it. Nobody did it.

44:26

So he gets away with it. But where he screws up is when he gets down to the shore, he yells or somehow mentions his name. I am Odysseus.

44:35

Hear me roar or whatever. And then the cat’s out of the bag. If he only shut up, they wouldn’t have known who did this to him.

44:41

But because he gave his name out loud to the Cyclops, they’re the offspring of Poseidon. And Poseidon now knows his Odysseus did this. So that’s why they get blown off course is because they find out Odysseus did that.

44:55

Had he kept his mouth shut and stuck with his joke name of nobody, he might have been home a fortnight later.

Dan LeFebvre

45:02

That almost sounds, I mean, it’s not the way it happens in the movie, but there are kind of nods to that. I think there’s, even though the Cyclops is not chatty at all, that he does kind of say something once. I think one of the men talks about how he’s like, oh, he mentioned Poseidon.

45:18

He must be Poseidon’s son. He kind of mentioned that. And then when they leave, Matt Damon’s version of Odysseus shoots the Cyclops when, and everybody else is like, why did you do that?

45:29

We could have just left. Why did you have to do that? Now Poseidon’s going to be all mad at us.

Neil Laird

45:33

And I don’t think that happened. And they definitely take his eye out, but they just even do it twice in the film. And I don’t know if that’s the way it was Homer or not.

45:43

I think he said it once and it was all about them just collectively. blinding this guy rather than going back and doing one more jab. I mean, maybe they would have come after him anyways.

45:52

They also get out in a very fun way in Homer. Maybe they pull back because it would have been so hard to stage. But how they get out in Homer is they cling to the bottom of the sheep.

46:06

Each one of them is holding on to the sheep. So as the sheep go out, he’s touching them all, but they’re all holding on underneath. And that’s how they get out one by one.

Dan LeFebvre

46:15

Okay. Yeah, because in the movie, they put on like little patches of grass to kind of be like, oh, we have fur.

Neil Laird

46:20

That doesn’t feel like wool. That’s not going to pull anybody. But it might look pretty cheesy if they’re doing that. They’re big guys, and you had to get some pretty big sheep to pull that off. Even in the original book, it felt a bit far-fetched.

Dan LeFebvre

46:32

Yeah, that’s true. I guess that’s one of those things that’s easier to read and imagine than to put on film. Well, in the movie, if we kind of go back to Odysseus on Calypso’s Island, It doesn’t really explain Calypso that much, but as I was watching this, I couldn’t help attire to another major movie franchise because she’s in the Pirates of the Caribbean, but there she’s like this deity that controls the ocean waters as opposed to Poseidon doing it here in the Odyssey. Who was Calypso in Homer’s Odyssey?

Neil Laird

47:01

Calypso was, yeah, she was not the same one as the one we know there. She was very much, I think she was a goddess. and again, she was a nymph and she lived on the island but she wasn’t seen as an evil villain. She actually loved him. A lot of times you find these nymphs that have pissed off Seuss or whatever and they’re sent to islands forever and I forget, I don’t know the details because I’ve known the mythology before the novel was in front of me, but that’s one of the cases. She was lonely sitting on an island probably because she pissed off one of the bastards up on the hill. This is where she spent her time. But she was half divine. She was a nymph, which means she’s the offspring of a god. So she had some power, but she was not a full-fledged goddess. She couldn’t do anything more than love him and care for him. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that’s a

Dan LeFebvre

47:57

lot. And the movie didn’t really, I mean, she was just kind of there. And it was a super deserted

Neil Laird

48:02

island. I thought they were the slowest sequences. There’s something he does very interesting. And But if you look at Nolan, a big trade of Nolan’s films is story within story.

48:14

He’ll move forward. He’ll move back. All the way back to Memento, you think.

48:18

They’re always telling the story. And it weaves back on itself. And he likes to play with time, which is nice because it doesn’t make it chronological.

48:24

And it fits Homer sort of because at the beginning of much of the story is him telling a story within a story. He starts that. You think Homer start or Nolan starts out with the bard banging his staff and saying, let me tell you about the Trojan War.

48:40

And he’s already telling a story in the past. And then we go to the guy, he did the same story. And Calypso very much.

48:49

Both Calypso and Athena, they’re there more as sort of a plot point for him to tell story to back, I think, to flashback. Sometimes a little awkwardly, I thought. But I thought the scenes with Calypso were the weakest and the slowest.

49:02

Because really nothing happens there other than what happened. Then what happened? Tell me more.

49:07

There was no drama within that scene other than her, which is probably why they gave her the Lotus. They gave some business to her. Otherwise, she’s the beautiful chick on the beach saying, tell me what you did last night.

49:19

There’s not much going on.

Dan LeFebvre

49:20

And because we don’t really see the time distance with Cersei and that element that happens in Homer’s Odyssey, there’s so much time spent on Calypso’s Island. They mentioned seven years.

Neil Laird

49:34

Seven years, and that’s in Homer, too. Seven years he sits there.

Dan LeFebvre

49:38

Yeah, but it sounds like in Homer’s Odyssey, that may have been seven years, which is a long time, but he also spent a long time in a lot of other places, whereas in the movie, he doesn’t really spend that much time in any other place. Calypso’s Island is really where he’s spending a majority of his time.

Neil Laird

49:54

You add it up, and I never really have, but you figure they say it’s going to take some 10 years to get home, So seven of it is on Calypso, a year of it is with Circe. The other eight years, I guess, are spreader among the other places they got stuck. So the lion’s share of that is with Calypso.

50:10

But it does take him a decade to get home. A decade of war and then a decade to get home. So 20 years in total.

Dan LeFebvre

50:17

Okay, okay. Well, in the movie, as Odysseus’ memory returns, he is determined to get home then. But in order to do that, he has to go back out to sea and give up control to Poseidon.

50:28

So he goes out to sea off Calypso’s Island. There’s a storm, presumably from Poseidon, and then he wakes up back on his homeland. And when he gets there, he takes Agamemnon’s approach to assess the situation undercover.

50:41

And things are not the same as when he left. We’ll get to the suitors in a moment, but how well does the movie show what happened when Odysseus returned home undercover as a beggar?

Neil Laird

50:51

Well, first of all, it takes him longer to get home. There’s another, I think he spent six months on another island. He gets picked up by, I forget the name, not the Phoenicians, the Phaeans.

51:02

But it’s an island that picks him up and takes him in. He says, tell me stories and you can stay. And he tells the story of how he got there.

51:11

So a lot of the Trojan horse and that stuff comes in later when he starts going back. And they help him out and they give him food and they say, oh, you’re a disease. We’ll get you to Ithaca, but don’t leave yet.

51:22

We have to vet you first and let you enjoy it. So he stays a very long time. I don’t know how long it is, but a good, good while.

51:29

He’s anxious to get back. But there’s nothing sinister about it. They just want to kind of keep him there because they love the parties and they love giving him gifts.

51:38

They give him all this stuff and they finally they give him ships to to sail back with. They say, we’re going to take you there personally. And the king is good for his word.

51:47

But then Poseidon finds out what they’re doing and he destroys the vessels and everybody on it. So they get destroyed for helping Odysseus. Now he’s on the raft of Lone and washes up his shore in Ithaca.

52:00

So that’s a whole hunk, no doubt, for a time frame, for pacing or whatever, that Nolan took out.

Dan LeFebvre

52:09

Yeah, yeah, there’s none of that. He just kind of washes up.

Neil Laird

52:12

I’m not sure it’s missed. Yeah. It was nice, you know, but yeah.

Dan LeFebvre

52:17

Yeah, more flashback sequences. Exactly. Another stop, another stop.

52:22

Well, I have to ask about one scene in the movie with Odysseus’ dog, Argos. We see him as a puppy earlier in the movie. He’s almost tossed away, but then Odysseus chooses him as a hunting dog.

52:33

And he’s a loyal companion to Odysseus. And then he lives with Don Leguizamo’s version of the blinds, Emenes, after Odysseus goes off to the Trojan War. And Emenes says he’s never seen a dog live for 20 years, but Argos seems to be hanging on to life just long enough to see his master again.

52:49

And then, and it is a scene that made me cry when I saw it. It was Odysseus returns home as a beggar. Not even his own son recognizes him until Odysseus stops to pet Argos one last time.

53:00

He wags his tail at the sight of his old friend and then finally dies. And that’s how Telemachus knows that the old beggar is his father. Did that happen?

Neil Laird

53:09

The first part, yes, is one of the most emotional sequences. Argos, the dog, it all happened. It’s a very emotional.

53:14

You know, I get teary-eyed when I listen to it or read it too. He waits 20 years and as soon as he knows it is his touch, he dies. The only difference is Tamanikis already knows. At that point, if I recall, he’s already been told by Odysseus who he is. So that isn’t the moment where he catches on, but the whole scene with the dog is as it was, even thrown on a pile of refuge or whatever. All that comes from Homer.

Dan LeFebvre

53:39

Wow. Yeah. I mean, that’s a nice little touch there, but yeah, that was definitely a very emotional scene in the movie.

Neil Laird

53:45

No one wants to see a dog die. Thousand guys can get ripped apart by bloodthirsty creatures, but never kill a dog.

Dan LeFebvre

53:52

And that’s the moment where you know that Robert Pattinson’s character is the bad guy because he’s the one that carries him out to put him on the dumb heap.

Neil Laird

53:59

You kick a dog and you toss him on a pile of rubbish, you know you’re going down.

Dan LeFebvre

54:05

Yeah. John Wick, whole series based on that. Well, throughout the movie, we see a lot of scenes of Odysseus’ wife and Hathaway’s version of Penelope.

54:16

She’s waiting for her husband’s return, But as the years tick on, there are more and more suitors who want to marry her for a chance at Ithaca’s throne. And there are a lot of suitors, but Robert Pattinson’s version of Antinus seems to be the ringleader who’s trying to take control by killing Odysseus and Penelope’s son, Telemachus. He’s played by Tom Holland.

54:37

And then at the end of the movie, Odysseus starts off just as the old beggar hiding in the corner, and he ends up facing off with the suitors in this big battle scene to win back Penelope’s hand. Was this fight at the end of the movie a faithful interpretation of what happened in Homer’s Odyssey?

Neil Laird

54:52

No, it was both more dramatic and less dramatic in Homer because they get the help from all the housekeepers and the housemates and the people who recognize them. And they take all the weapons and hide it. And they come out and they help them.

55:08

And Temelechus comes out and does battle with him. They make a little more superhero. The Patterson character isn’t quite nearly the Whipley Snidelash evil guy that he is.

55:18

You know, he’s he’s one of many bad suitors here. They really brought it down to a sort of revenge thing where he takes them out one by one. It becomes sort of a superhero.

55:29

It takes them with just his bare hands. In truth is, he had more people helping him. It’s much more bloody and dramatic.

55:36

There’s a scene where they finally get a hold of all that. The maids that that helped out. They hang them all.

55:42

including the one you see in the film. Everybody goes down. They clean up house.

55:47

Nobody survives. And it is father and son and also those few people who still follow him that do it. So it is a bloodbath.

55:56

In a way, it’s a very dramatic sequence, of course, because you want to see him go after the guy who’s trying to take his wife and take his house. So it makes sense on an emotional level, but it wasn’t quite superhero takedown that it was in the film.

Dan LeFebvre

56:09

Did his son, because in the movie, it makes a point to mention that his son can’t actually attack the suitors because they are from the rich families. And if they do, then they’ll exile him and that sort of approach. So it has to be Odysseus the only one.

Neil Laird

56:20

I don’t think that’s the case there. If that’s said, he certainly doesn’t do it, doesn’t change to the end. They’re all after, they’re all taking him down.

56:26

And he doesn’t really have a scene. There’s also a movie scene where he’s fighting the guy one floor up. That’s also an addition to fighting.

56:33

And you could tell, everybody gets a chance to fight. It’s a classic Marvel movie trope, right? Well, this fight’s taken on.

56:39

This one’s going on next door, right? And it works. It works cinematically, but it didn’t come from Homer.

Dan LeFebvre

56:44

What about the challenge element of having to pull the bow and string the bow? Was that something from Homer’s Odyssey?

Neil Laird

56:51

Yeah, that’s very classic. That comes right from the source. And her weaving it and unweaving it every day, the shroud for her father, him being the beggar who does it and no one else can.

57:02

That’s all classic Homer stuff. But what’s interesting is Penelope doesn’t accept him straight away. In the film verse, and he has a little pin or whatever, and she must recognize right away when he’s strengthened.

57:16

You know, I couldn’t, I just rewatched Excalibur for the first time in years. And I couldn’t help but think of the Excalibur scene. It’s like only who can take it from the stone, who can bow.

57:26

You can see those tropes keep coming back in history. And here, she very quickly assumes it’s him or she’s onto him. But there’s one little scene at the end where she tests him.

57:39

And it’s a scene that it would have been nice to have because it’s a very emotional scene in Homer where when he comes into the bed chamber, she tells her maids and her housekeeper to move the bed, to move it over here, which seemed like a strange thing. And they start picking it up and they’re making a mess of it. And then Odysseus jumps in, you can’t move that bed. You know, you can’t move that bed because one of the legs is actually the trunk of an olive tree that they put there.

58:11

Only they knew about. And they built the bed on top of it. No one would have known that one of those legs was stuck to the ground, except for the guy who slept there.

58:23

So it tells you, A, nobody else knows about it. But then, but it also is finally proof positive in her eyes that this is my husband come home.

Dan LeFebvre

58:30

Which, in my mind, it seems like something that sounds really good on paper. But I think I would notice if part of my bed was actually a tree trunk.

Neil Laird

58:43

Like, even if it trimmed it down, I don’t know. But the argument is how many guys get in there. I guess she was faithful to in those 20 years.

58:50

But yeah, I mean, you didn’t really need it. I don’t think they had the brooch in there. I think, you know, we saw that in, didn’t they do the same thing in Gladiator or other things?

59:00

here’s this this comes from your father or whatever it’s a great thing to kind of say here’s proof of it they do make more in homer of the housemaid it was the older housemate who has who’s also faithful and she sees the scar on his leg it’s very quick in the movie but she knows that only odysseus would have that scar so she knows straight away that’s a bigger scene in in the uh in the uh

Dan LeFebvre

59:23

play or the play in the in the poem than it is in the film okay okay yeah yeah there’s that scene with her and then there was the brooch but there was also just after stringing it the way he kind of plucks the note you know it’s that she kind of turns like oh there’s only one person that does

Neil Laird

59:39

that I mean she you know I thought it was a nice portrayal of Penelope but I like that they have that scene at the end because she’s trying to understand her husband and at that point it’s no longer are you a dissy says why the hell did you leave me for 20 years and what happened so it’s kind of like I get a feeling in my own head she already knows who it is but she wants to hear his story before she allows him back into her life.

Dan LeFebvre

01:00:02

And he’s trying to explain why he stayed with Calypso for seven years and Cersei for a year.

Neil Laird

01:00:07

Exactly. And it was a monster in the world, but you wouldn’t believe it had to go to the 80s. You all wouldn’t believe it. Is that lipstick? Is that lipstick on your two lips?

Dan LeFebvre

01:00:18

Well, back in the movie, after the fight, Odysseus said that the fight at the end, Odysseus is wounded, but he’s not killed. Penelope does recognize him. Everybody realizes who he is.

01:00:27

And with the suitors, that fought back out of the way. It seems like everything is kind of ending happily ever after. While Odysseus and Penelope sail off into the unknown West to honor those who have died under Odysseus’ command in the wars, to rectify those wrongs, their son Telemachus becomes the king in Ithaca.

01:00:44

How well does the movie show the ending of the story?

Neil Laird

01:00:46

Very different. Very, very different. Though you could be argued that the Odyssey has one of the worst endings ever.

01:00:51

It’s almost like the last 20 pages have just been torn out. It just ends. The way it ends in the play, I can say play, sorry.

01:00:59

I’ve been thinking of now some sort of tragic play, some Achilles or something. The way it ends in the epic poem is that he’s going after everybody. I mentioned he kills a dozen housekeepers or whatever it is.

01:01:15

And then he goes after all the other suitors’ families. And he is about to start a war in Ithaca and kill everybody. So he goes and he gathers an army up.

01:01:24

And he goes to one village where a bunch of the suitors and their families are saying, you were gone for 20 years. How could we know? And you killed my son.

01:01:32

And he’s now going after the survivors of the family. And then one of the gods come down, Athena or one of the others. They come down and say, this ends here.

01:01:44

Make up and learn to live with it. And that’s how it ends. Bam.

01:01:48

It’s like two paragraphs. And then she comes at end. Okay.

01:01:51

And so they ended it.

Dan LeFebvre

01:01:53

And the end.

Neil Laird

01:01:54

Okay. So they never go to the West. One big thing that Homer and his time period would never do would be feel guilty about going to war. This was the age of heroes. Remember, this was the age of Hercules and all that stuff. So war itself was not a bad thing because everybody done it.

01:02:13

So there was no sense of him feeling guilty about bringing Troy down. And that is very much a modern convention, very much the guilt, once again, that we talked about, like Oppenheimer, that he feels after the fact that was created in the 21st century sensibility. So that whole idea of him leaving and going to West to honor his men, which isn’t a big thing in Homer, is a creation by Nolan to give his new story, his coming around to helping the dead who died under his watch, the proper burial, the proper send-off.

Dan LeFebvre

01:02:49

Well, that makes sense, too. I mean, if in Homer’s Odyssey, if he comes back to Ithaca and basically starts a new war, like, obviously, he doesn’t feel bad about the Trojan War, then if he’s just coming back to start a new one.

Neil Laird

01:03:00

Good point, which is really history, yeah. They even say something like, our deeds will be remembered until they’re not, and everyone does it again or something at the very end. It’s like, yeah, the beat goes on, you know.

01:03:11

This is before the Romans show up. So you got a lot of blood coming in the future. So it’s not exactly like this is the war to end all wars.

Dan LeFebvre

01:03:20

True, true. Well, thank you so much for coming on to talk about The Odyssey. Is there anything else that we haven’t covered that you want to share about the movie?

Neil Laird

01:03:28

No, I think it’s a great film. I really enjoyed it. And look, I’m just so happy that someone spent a gazillion dollars making a film about the Bronze Age.

01:03:37

In my world, that is like the happiest thing possible. And he did it smartly. It’s a much better film than Troy, which I had a lot of problems with.

01:03:47

It was more comic book-y and more sort of dumbed down. The Odyssey is a much better film, so I’m really glad that it’s doing so well.

Dan LeFebvre

01:03:54

Well, we have been talking about a story that’s like 3,000 years old, but let’s shift gears to a much newer story because you have a brand new addition to your Primetime Travelers series, all about something that we’ve talked about today. Troy, can you share more about your Primetime Troy with my audience? Absolutely. I do know my Troy at this point

Neil Laird

01:04:11

because I spent the last two years in that world. so I think we talked about before I do I was a non-documented filmmaker for 30 years and then I do I transfer a transmute fiction and I do a time travel series based on a tv crew a largely feckless tv crew that travels through time and the first book is about them going to ancient Egypt the second one is them on the eve of Pompeii during the eruption and the third book is them going back to Troy they’re actually visited by Achilles personally and say can you come back to the Trojan War and make me live this time. And if you do, I’ll give you the best film ever.

01:04:44

Because how can you say no? So the whole book is about them going back. Again, the tricky thing about this one, unlike the others, is Pompeii and ancient Egypt, we know, happened.

01:04:55

Can you mess up history when it didn’t happen? Is a myth even real? Are you going to go back there and just find two guys and a push card in a muddy field?

01:05:05

And they go back and they find a lot of it was happening. but a lot of this stuff they have to create, like the horse. The TV executives want a horse, but they tell Achilles and they tell Agamemnon and everybody, we have to create a horse.

01:05:16

They say, that’s the stupidest thing ever. Where did that idea come from? There’s no horse here.

01:05:21

But for the network, the network wants their horse. So I’m using our understanding of the Iliad and the Odyssey as a point to both examine some of the absurdities of how we interpret it, but also to kind of show how we can’t help but meadow in the past even when we shouldn’t. So it really is a comedic take and a very serious subject, and there’s a lot of death and gore and stuff, but it’s my kind of wry way of looking at the Iliad and ancient Troy in a way that only a time-traveling TV crew can.

Dan LeFebvre

01:05:54

I almost think of another Christopher Nolan movie, Inception. Like, they go back and put the idea in Odysseus’ head to have this Trojan horse.

Neil Laird

01:06:03

Exactly, they do. You have to whisper it. exactly what it is it’s kind of can we start a rumor campaign and it’s kind of fun how it all happens because you know once they get the ball rolling and remember disney is has big seaman goes i don’t know how to make a horse i i can make a ship but i have no idea what a horse looks like and of course the horse looks like the one on you know the badger out of monty python’s holy grail whatever it is not quite the classic that we think of when we see the movie it is it is a lot more

Dan LeFebvre

01:06:30

crammed and a lot less inviting. Not as quite picturesque as Jolens’ version.

Neil Laird

01:06:37

So yeah. So the book comes out on Amazon. All three will be available after August. August 1st of 26, Primetime Troy comes out. And I’ll make sure to add all those links in

Dan LeFebvre

01:06:47

the show notes for this episode as well. Thank you again so much for your time, Neil.

Neil Laird

01:06:50

No, it’s always a pleasure. Thanks for having me, man.

Dan LeFebvre

01:07:03

this episode of based on a true story was produced by me dan lefebvre thank you once again to neil laird for coming on to the show to chat about the odyssey if you want to have another wonderful story set around the trojan war check out neil’s latest book called prime time troy i’ve got a link to that in the show notes, as well as links to Neil’s other work so you can catch up on the Primetime Travelers series. And if you are driving home from the theater right now, it’s probably not best to pick up your phone to check out the show notes. So you can always find those links on the shows home on the web at baseonatruestorypodcast.com slash 388. Okay, now it’s time for the answer to our two truths and a lie game from the beginning of the episode. And as a quick refresher, here are the two truths and one lie again. Number one, Telemachus is Odysseus and Penelope’s son.

01:07:50

Number two, Odysseus travels to Hades to speak to the dead. Number three, Menelaus came up with the idea for the Trojan horse. Did you figure out which one is a lie? I’ve got the envelope, let’s open that up. And the lie is number three. As we learned from Neil, it was not Menelaus who came up with the idea for the Trojan horse, but the movie was correct to show Odysseus being the one who came up with that idea, as well as being one of these soldiers who was on the inside.

01:08:19

As always, thank you for your continued support listening to and sharing this episode based on a true story with someone else that you think would enjoy it. If you know someone else going to see The Odyssey, share this episode with them to find out the true story. Now, if you’re watching the video version of this, check around for the credits. And if you can find out my cat’s name and email it to me, I’ll send you a sticker. Thanks again for watching and I hope to hear from you soon.