Friday, July 17, marks the opening day for the much-anticipated epic film, The Odyssey, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. This cinematic adaptation of Homer’s ancient Greek poem stars Matt Damon in the lead role as Odysseus.
Our social team captured Sarah Brown Ferrario, associate professor of Greek and Latin and chair of The Catholic University of America’s Department of Ancient and Medieval Languages and Cultures, as she reacts to this film’s trailer with a historian’s eye. She notes where Hollywood altered Homer's original poem and unpacks why the sea functions as a character in its own right, as an omnipresent force and the "pathway that leads Odysseus away from home and then back there again."
She also muses on why neither the film nor the ancient poem itself was ever really trying to give an archaeological representation of Bronze Age Greece and the mythological Trojan War – especially since the original poem was captured over hundreds of years of retelling before it was written down.
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