Odysseus: Voyage to the Underworld

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.

A funny thing happened on the way to Ithaca...Odysseus went off course and inadvertently discovered the origin of vampires. Not as bad as it sounds, the story is grounded in Greek myth but reconstitutes Persephone as an evil lamia with vampiric children from Hades who lures the wily Greek and his crew for aid in her plot to conquer mortals. The concept is a good one, however poorly written and executed. Despite a lagging pace and the irritating presence of a post-adolescent poet Homer, the film looks good with imposing Arnold Vosloo and the rest of the crew looking pretty much like Homeric heroes, rather than the scroungy leather trouser-wearing biker rejects that seem to be so lamentably much in vogue in BC epics these days. Unfortunately, the two best actors of the crew get killed off, one rather too soon. Mercifully, viewers are also spared the annoying, wailing nonsensical Celtic and/or Moroccan women posing as soundtracks and incidental music score which is also far too prevalent in productions of this kind. However, in the interior cave sequence I did detect very subtly a chorus in the background singing "Agnus dei", a total non sequitur. With a better script, a better use of the actors on hand, and a brisker pace this would have been a winner. It's always a pleasure to see Mr. Vosloo, and he can't be faulted in his rendering of Odysseus.

Truth be told, then I had no particular expectations to this movie. And I will say that the movie is entertaining enough, but it could have been better.

The story is a fairly common one; Odysseus sailing for Ithica and finding the Isle of Mist along the way. Yadda, yadda, yadda... Fairly average storyline with nothing overly impressive or new here.

As a movie of this type, trying to tell an epic tale of ancient history, the movie doesn't really manage to punch through and make a lasting mark or statement. It sort of never rises beyond mediocrity, which was a shame.

The effects in the movie were adequate, well most of them at least. The creatures were hilariously fake to look at. They looked like horribly fake rendered CGI rejects. Had the special effects team worked harder on this, the movie could have been more enjoyable. It is sort of difficult to take something serious when it looks like something that came out of an early 1990's PC game, back when 3D graphics were still an eyesore.

I will say that the props and wardrobe people actually did a great job in the movie, because the costumes and garments were really nice to look at; great details and it did seem valid enough.

Acting-wise, then the movie wasn't all that noticeable. Perhaps because the characters were fairly mundane and generic, not really displaying much personality of difference from one another. It should be said that Arnold Vosloo (playing Odyesseus), Randal Edwards (playing Homer) and Stefanie von Pfetten (playing Persephone) were actually doing their part to carry the movie nicely.

If you enjoy classic tales of this genre, then there are other movies that deal with the same tale and subject that does it better than this one. I am sure that if you are a hardcore fan of ancient history and legends, then you will find some enjoyment and amusement in this movie. For us who just want to watch it for the entertainment of a movie, then "Odyesseus & the Isle of Mists" turns out to be fairly mediocre and it is not the type of movie that is likely to be on the watch-list a second time around.

This movie held during the journey of Odysseus after Trojan War included Homer as a man of his crew, what is impossible for three or four centuries. The expected beginning as a B movie (bad CGI and cliché dialogues will appear throughout the film) was followed by a scene in which the crew was concerned about the song of the sirens. When flying creatures appeared surrounding the ship I got surprised, asking myself: "would this movie be a rare case of true adaptation to Greek mythology?" Sirens were not mermaids, as they are recurrently portrayed nowadays, but partly women, partly birds creatures. However, soon I noticed that they were original creatures not present in any myth, and so is the mist isle itself. Demons who attack injured warriors exist in Greek mythology, but the rest of the story does not fit. Persephone and Hades' offspring, the Erinyes, were ugly winged creatures, but also quite different from those bat-like ones with shining eyes from the film, both physically and in their attributes. As a matter of fact, this is just one more B film aiming to have the flavour of Greek myths but no connection to them. The plot is a new version of the very same overly repeated story of a evil one trying to dominate the world. Besides that, Hades is, as usual, misaddressed as Christian hell and not as the Greeks saw it, and the fact that there is a "hellfire cross" in the movie is just one more evidence of it. Perhaps having inserted an original character, a diviner named Christos, is a Freudian slip. The ending, seeming a parody of Bram Stocker, mentioning vampiric creatures fearing the signnof the cross, is ridiculous.

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.