I Don’t Want To Learn About History At The Movies And You Can’t Make Me
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey has recently begun filming, but I’m sure you know that already. If you’re reading an online arts publication with 98 followers I have to assume you also just receive updates on large upcoming films via the bluetooth chip they put in your brain the first time you went to see a film in theatres by yourself. If not, I imagine you probably found out through either terrible fan-made, AI-Generated posters from Facebook or from an instagram post with 27 slides listing The Odyssey’s ridiculously star-studded cast playing enough named characters that I’m led to assume that if you lived in Greece around 1200 BC you had no option but to be in The Odyssey, like how if you were over five foot eight in New Zealand in 2001 you were just at some point going to be bundled into an unmarked van and taken to the Lord Of The Rings set. Oh yeah, side note before I forget- make sure you remember to be in Athens next Friday for your wardrobe fitting, they told me to tell you.
Or perhaps, if you are the kind of person who did not fucking play about Percy Jackson when you were 12 or who currently does not fucking play about Assassin’s Creed now you are 25, you heard about the production of Nolan’s The Odyssey through one of many furious threads or articles about how the first look at Matt Damon in costume as protagonist Odysseus is not historically accurate to the look of armour from the Mycenaen Era, roughly when The Odyssey is set. I do not know if scrolling through these late at night counts as encouraging the algorithm to keep them coming, or if they really are just so numerous as to come across my desk every couple days like requests to remove the mercury supplements from our office cooler. Either way, I am often exposed to threads, articles, greentext screenshots, takes about how Christopher Nolan is a rube who doesn’t respect or understand history, and photoshop edits by a user whose profile picture is a marble statue with the Ukrainian flag in their display name (if not always literally, then spiritually) of Damon in authentic Mycenaean armour who is lamenting what ‘should have been.’
Now, I’m aware that I’m not really at the meat and potatoes of what I exactly think about this school of thought but I have probably given enough away by now for you to gather that I do not agree with these takes. I have stopped short of resorting to calling them dorks who don’t understand cinema history (or did I…) because I wanted to save the more performative mockery until after I showed you what Mycenaean armour looks like, if you don’t already know. But before we get there, I want to just take a second to lead into it with a small, guided, interactive section of this article. Perhaps the first in Unlaced Magazine’s history, unless you count when I put Last Christmas over our post about Matt’s Christmas Song piece to disqualify anyone taking part in the Wham! game like getting done by the audio-digital holiday equivelant of punji sticks.
Imagine a large black screen before you. It’s finally time… you got tickets for opening night, at last you are here, planted in your seat in a packed evening showing- The Odyssey. To your left, a packed row of excited faces. To your right, a bag of magic stars you bought at the cinema concessions because you wanted to treat yourself and remembered them being like £2.50 tops but were too anxious to not buy when the employee serving you said they would be £3.80 and are now too upset to tuck into because you have learnt that the difference between a one-off treat and a chest-tightening financial hit for you is less than £1.50. Here it is. A return to swords and sandals epics, a truly excessive cast of performers, and one of the most technically proficient and proven blockbuster filmmakers working right now at its helm. The lights go down. Studio logos come and go. The sound of waves lapping at the shore. The cawing of seagulls far overhead. Title drop. ‘THE ODYSSEY’. Months of marketing, over a year of anticipation for this moment. We fade in our star, Matt Damon’s Odysseus, a hero of legend, rather the hero of the legend, our protagonist for what will undoubtedly be one of the biggest releases this side of Avatar 3 and that side of Avatar 4. The sun, the sea, the production design, the sets, the excitement, the roaring of an angered Poseidon’s tidal waves all frame and emphasise the reveal. The character who will drive this blockbuster made to continue the spirit of the films that defined popular entertainment and mainstream film culture at the advent of early talky cinema… the films that gave us our first reference point for what a cinematic epic was. The latest in a deeply, truly esteemed lineage of filmmaking.
Close your eyes for a few seconds. Try to imagine this man, this anticipation and curiosity in what may be to come in his legend. Go on, please do it…
…Done? Cool, thank you. Now imagine he looks like this.
That is a man wearing Mycenaean Armour created in the image of surviving historical artefacts and examples, worn in the way we can best infer ancient Mycenaeans did, and decorated to look somewhat like our estimations of how it would have appeared in its glory days before the next 3600 years got to work on it. Those glory days being, of course, period of history where the Trojan War occurred, a significant part of the story of The Odyssey is set, at least in its written myth. My Dad is a big fan of Time Team and I absorbed a lot of it passively as a child, and writing all that in such a professional tone came surprisingly easy. I should do that more. Got my night of wikipedia articles in bed all lined up in my head now. Anyway, it looks goofy as shit. Absolutely nobody besides ancient history enthusiasts would be able to look at that on an IMAX screen and take it seriously at best, or would not laugh and turn to ask their friends why Elmer Fudd from A Night At The Opera is on screen at worst.
When it comes to discussions about historical accuracy in art, I feel like you need to ask two primary questions about a subject. Is the piece in question deliberately trying to tell a story that hinges on many factual, well-documented events? Then, following a potential ‘yes’ to that question- is it taking itself 100% seriously? If the answer to both questions is yes, then guess what! That’s right, it still doesn’t mean the art has any obligation be completely accurate to the historical record because art very infrequently carries a level of responsibility that demands it must honour every nuance of a given time period. My primary issue with the belief that deviance from historical veracity is indicative of, and one and the same as, artistic neglect and laziness is because the only conclusion it begs is- do you feel this way all the time? Are we not rocking with Inglorious Basterds because they kill Hitler in a hail of bullets at the end? You walked out of Napoleon because there is no documented instance of him stomping his feet and begging his much-taller wife to have sex with him like a kid begging his Mum to grab him a Wispa when she’s on a milk run? You turned off The Mummy because they didn’t mention the three mighty obelisks of the great Under-Polynesia, the tips of which we now know form the pyramids? So many lives… only half lived…
As I mentioned earlier, when trying to establish some grand preamble leading into my bit about closing your eyes and then opening them to look at a man wearing a Strongbow can, swords-and-sandals epics are a cornerstone of 20th century filmmaking. You ever fall asleep sitting up on the sofa on Boxing day at 6pm to Jason And The Argonauts or Ben-Hur on Channel 5 after deliberately making yourself bankrupt in Monopoly after you realised your brother was absolutely never going to just fucking give you Trafalgar Square and just let you have one fucking set? Congratulations, you bore witness to an artefact of an artistic era that was once monumental in the development of modern cinema. That wasn’t just a bit about Monopoly, that happened, I don’t think it’s all that funny really but I’m going to keep it in here to see if my brother actually reads these.
What I’m trying to say is that ancient historical epics and retellings of myth are foundational subgenres and styles of filmmaking. They are also laughably inaccurate to any fact or record. I mean, for God’s sake, just look 1956s The Conqueror starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan- they completely neglected to mention that the majority of the Mongol army at the height of its power were Turkic, not Avni. These films were also, by and large, meant to be accessible in their time as adventure movies for families to take the kids to who were too old go and learn to start smoking but too young for induction day at the power plant. Obviously, attention spans wain and now I imagine it would be difficult to find many kids who would be as gripped by Clash Of The Titans as they are by Family Guy All Racist Jokes Dark Humour Moments Compilation (Part 1) on YouTube, but filmmakers like, say, Christopher Nolan most definitely were. The Odyssey, for a blockbuster filmmaker who is more often than most given astronomical budgets and a large amount of creative control, represents a chance to create something new in a faded genre that was once a pillar of their art form, but is now not often allowed to be made with the equivalent budgets and scope. The Odyssey It isn’t just a myth, it is THE myth, one of the oldest stories ever recorded in the history of our species and the exact kind of film you want a big-budget director to make after cashing in all their goodwill from a recent awards speedrun and a past superhero trilogy that made billions of dollars and ruined the HMV T-Shirt section forever more. A Myth. A MYTH. THE ODYSSEY IS A MYTH. THE ODYSSEY DID NOT ACTUALLY HAPPEN. THE ODYSSEY WAS AN UNDERSTOOD WORK OF FICTION EVEN DURING A TIME WHERE THE AVERAGE PERSON BELIEVED AS FACT THAT DOZENS OF GODS LIVED ON A WALKABLE HILL JUST OUTSIDE THEIR CITY AND ENJOYED KNOCKING UP COMMON FOLK LIKE UNHAPPY INVESTMENT BANKERS IN A NEW BUILD SUBURB.
Edited image by Twitter user @MMattTenet, 2025.
I don’t care that the leaked set photos of Nolan’s The Odyssey has the cast in armour that is not accurate to the Mycenaean Era, I don’t care that it borrows more from later Greek history than ancient Mycenaean, and I don’t care that Spider-Man AND The Punisher are both going to be in so please stop putting those edits by accounts called ‘ComicLife_Media’ on my Instagram explore page, please please please. And for the love of God, neither should you. It would be great to see a film where accurate Mycenaean Armour doesn’t give me the same feeling I get when I see a dog that is dying because it is too fat to run properly anymore, it really would. But I can’t say I’m prepared to sit here and say that a multi-million dollar swords-and-sandals epic being made by the only filmmaker today who is able to consistently use such (frankly, sickeningly) large budgets of money to their fullest extent is going to be far worse off for not entertaining that concept.
When I showed that photograph of the man in Mycenaean armour earlier, I made sure to use an actual photograph of an actual human wearing it, because many popular depictions of it are via modern illustrations or ancient art and as cool as it may look there, that is not what would be on screen in its hundreds in a film like The Odyssey. The fact that it's a very awkward photo that gets funnier the more you look at it was just a bonus, and I didn’t even need to look that hard for it. Go on, scroll back up to it, imagine that guy asking Matt Damon where the boat is parked.
The Independent, article by Inga Parkel, 2025.
There is an air of smugness that radiates from a lot of the posts and articles such as those I mentioned before. Many of them written as if the authors are in on a little secret that the plebeians just can’t comprehend. These are people, ultimately, who do not understand what makes art impactful, why tropes and cliches exist in genre cinema, and how they are so readily understood and resonated with. If you ask someone to describe to you in words what a sci-fi film looks like and what they may see in it, they might possibly say- for example- neon lighting, spaceships and people in green makeup. Why? Because that is just some of the broad visual shorthand for an entire world of cinema and stories distilled over the last one hundred years of the artform. Swords and sandals epics are no different. Tell you what, I’m going to annoy ask my girlfriend right now, who is laid on my bed reading a book, to ‘tell me three things you would see in a historical epic in an ancient era’. Bear with, one second, she just turned a page and I feel bad cutting in before she can get a couple sentences down to really lock in the new page. Alright, asking her now.
She said, “Swords, Horses and… Fire.” A few seconds passed, then she followed herself up to clarify she meant, “like a campfire, or a torch.”
Next, I asked her to describe the person on the horse holding the torch, what they look like, what they are wearing. “Maybe he’s wearing armour, maybe one of those shirts that’s like a V-Neck with strings across it at the top that can tie it up, but it’s never tied up.”
Ultimately, That is what Matt Damon’s more-Corinthian-than-Mycenaean style of helmet is. That is what his inaccurate leather bracers are. They are all but a V-Neck shirt with strings across it at the top to tie it up, but that are never tied up. Those kinds of anachronistic but established touches of production design are the immediate signifiers of works of historical-fiction cinema that come to the forefront of a person’s mind when the genre is brought up to them. Why? Because she has seen them before. In many decades, In many colours, in many moods. They inform a truly vast, wide world of stories, they are the colours that have painted a popular landscape of cinema and form a common font for artistic daydreams of civilisations long past.
If you cannot understand why total historical accuracy is oftentimes nowhere near as attractive to an artist as keeping alive the traditions and signifiers of such a rich and deep-rooted genre, if that is truly all it takes to turn you against a story?
Got to imagine you’d hate a myth.
