‘The Odyssey’ trailer sparks debate over American accents in a classic epic: “sounds like an epic conversation outside Starbucks”
The director’s creative choice has sparked online debate about tradition, tone, and historical expectations.
The new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ was released this week, offering us a fresh look at the epic scope the director aims to create—a scale not seen in quite some time. Along with this, we also got something the first teaser released in December didn’t show: more dialogue scenes. This has sparked a new controversy: all the characters have American accents.
“So out of place in a sword and sandals movie”
One of the unwritten rules of Hollywood cinema is that epic films set in the past “must” feature a British accent, for some reason. This has been the case from classic productions like ‘The Ten Commandments’ to more recent films like ‘Gladiator’. In this case, the actors—including British performers like Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson—use American accents and diction. This raises inevitable questions: we don’t know if Odysseus ever rallied his troops with a “Let’s go,” or if “daddy” was a common expression in Ancient Greece.
In the comments on YouTube and Reddit, the discussion has centered on how this accent defies traditional genre expectations, with opinions ranging from “That ‘My dad is coming home’ line just feels so out of place in a sword-and-sandal movie with this much gravitas,” to “It sounds like they’re trying to have an epic conversation on the sidewalk outside the Starbucks,” though there are also those who point out that the cliché no longer makes sense and can be left behind.
With the release of the first teaser, our colleague Borja Ruete had already written about how absurd it is to demand absolute historical accuracy in a movie: “Even if The Odyssey were based on historical events, films do not have to be faithful to reality. As with Gladiator, directors and screenwriters take liberties, which is not wrong, no matter how much Twitter users jump down their throats. Historical accuracy must be found in other types of works, and audiences must be aware that what they are going to see is not a faithful reproduction of the past.”
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‘The Odyssey’ opens exclusively in theaters on July 17.
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