Odysseus & the Isle of Mists

It's neither good nor bad, amateurish acting, poor direction with compentent special f/x,weak script/dialogue. Many movies lately just can't seem to get the language of a time period right without adding ridiculous modern dialogue clichés, slangs and what not. I kept waiting for one of them to pull out a cellphone because most the performances were phoned in, for me the beginning was the worse stupid twinkling lights in the background of scenes of them on the ship while long shots with harpies flying over head were of a cloudy twilight sky, so where did the twinkling stars come from....this is just pointing out one of many flaws and of course this ship was filmed in a studio with no water at all, I'm sure of it. If you're a fan of sword and sandal sci-fi adventure with sorcery and magic it only barely acts as an apetizer, a lightly flavored one at that, leaving you wanting terribly that you had The Odyssey starring Armande Assante in your DVD collection because watching all the hours of a rerun would be more satisfying than watching 90 minutes once you remove commercials of this drivel. I had tivo'd and fortunately was able to fastforward some simply painful dialogue moments in order to watch the special f/x. One thing to keep in mind few things shown as Sci-Fi Channel orginals they are really just productions from foreign markets like Canada, BBC, Germany or worse some reckless direct to video producer. Voslo does what he can but with this material its a wasted effort.

I didn't think SciFi Channel could broadcast a worse myth-&-monster movie than MINOTAUR. I was wrong.

It's okay to make a movie on the cheap; not everyone has access to a big budget, and amazing things can be done with a little imagination and talent. But there's very little of those commodities here. Acting is at a high school level. Direction is worse. Dialogue is trite. Scenes lurch from one dull monster attack to another, with occasional babe (er, goddess) interludes to break the monotony. The goddesses look and sound as it they're reading cue cards at a second-rate beauty contest.

Why must the makers of such movies mess with Greek myth, about which they clearly know (and care) nothing? Here, Homer the tale-teller appears as part of Odysseus's crew. That's an okay idea. Except this Homer (played by the worst actor of the lot, which is saying something) scribbles notes (with a feather quill!) and fawns over the heroes like an embedded reporter in Iraq. Legend tells us that Homer was blind, and recited his stories from memory. There is great power in that idea, a hearkening back to a prehistoric, preliterate age of traveling bards and oral tradition.

A magical movie could be made about Odysseus, and Homer, but this is not it.

I've come not to expect much from any SyFy "original" movie. This particular one, though, plumbs new depths of bad writing, atrocious plotting, mediocre-to-bad acting and weak execution. It hijacked names from Greek mythology and applied them to the movie's two-dimensional characters in an attempt, I suppose, to give them some apparent depth, and then to compound the theft shamelessly grabbed some material from Christianity and Bram Stoker, and THEN, not content with making a complete mess of things, swiped an ending right out of any one of the "Halloween" movies. It was flat, predictable and never more than minimally interesting.

A decent enough film, certainly not good but not really bad.

The acting is patchy. Vosloo is quite good as Obysseus, Bourne and Antonakos are OK in their roles but Edwards is terrible as Homer, not so much his performance as the fact that while the other characters are talking in a old style Homer speaks like a modern person and this jars every time he talks and finally Gibson is awful, completely wooden, but thankfully she isn't in it long.

The story is simple with good guys and bad guys and we are in no real doubt about which is which. It is an old fashioned fantasy film with OK effects although the action sequences are a bit poor.

Its a cheap film with a simple script and a decent pace.

The mixture of modern and old speech patterns is annoying and the cheesy extra bit at the end is also annoying but it'll kill a bit of time painlessly.

I really wanted to like this film. I truly did. The cast seemed excellent (although the inclusion of "Homer" should have told me all I needed to know about the script). Sadly, the best looking men on screen could not save this one.

The language is always a problem, and I realize that it is hard to decide between going for pure period speech or making it all modern. I prefer the former with some latitude for comprehensibility, but too many writers today don't even realize how people spoke in times past, so the occasional slip into a modern cliché is just glaring.

So as long as you don't pay any money for it and put your brain in neutral you'll get through it fine. Chant the mantra: entertainment value.