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.

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.

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.

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.

Actually I was using a bit of hyperbole, it wasn't as atrocious as I made it out to be in the summary, but to be honest it is still pretty bad. Some of the scenery and costumes are decent, some of the monsters are interesting and Arnold Vosloo is imposing and charismatic enough as Odysseus. However, the story is hackneyed and is very uneven in pace, the dialogue is a vast majority of the time absolutely abysmal, the direction is heartless, the pace is poor and the acting with exception of Vosloo is laughable particularly with Homer and the goddesses. While the ending comes across as rather cheesy. To conclude, pretty bad but there are some minor redeeming qualities. 3/10 Bethany Cox